The Dangerous Illusion of False Empathy: Why Defending Lindsay Clancy Erases the Victims and Distorts the Truth

“I could have been Lindsay Clancy.” That haunting, viral refrain has echoed across social media platforms, parenting forums, and courthouse steps ever since the Massachusetts mother was charged with the murder of her three young children. Countless women, looking back at their own harrowing postpartum suffering, insist that they see their own reflection in her horrific tragedy.

They passionately characterize this reaction as the ultimate expression of maternal empathy, but observers note that they are missing a crucial, fundamental distinction. Recognizing your own past emotional pain in someone else’s story is simply not the same thing as truly knowing the complex reality of her mind.

Outside public rallies and across viral online comment sections, the collective chorus continues to grow louder by the day: “I was depressed too; I felt dismissed by doctors too; I know what she went through.” Yet critics argue that this well-intentioned solidarity glosses over an immense, terrifying psychological gulf between shared distress and violent action.

Two women can endure profoundly similar emotional suffering following childbirth without sharing the exact same clinical diagnosis, the same mental breakdown, or the same relationship to objective reality. Clancy’s supporters are routinely overlooking those essential distinctions, and that blind spot is fundamentally distorting how the public understands this entire high-profile case.

The cultural fallout from this reaction does not stop at misinterpreting a high-profile legal battle; it carries far deeper, more damaging consequences for society at large. Their impassioned defense risks actively reinforcing the stigma surrounding postpartum depression while pushing three innocent, deceased children to the margins of the narrative.

Far too many commentators, online influencers, and everyday observers are currently discussing postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis as though they are the exact same condition. They are emphatically not, and treating them as interchangeable blurs the vital line between common maternal distress and an acute, violent psychiatric break from reality.

The clinical differences between the two conditions are vast, distinct, and undeniable to anyone examining the medical reality of maternal health. Postpartum depression, which affects roughly one in eight new mothers, can bring profound sadness, paralyzing anxiety, overwhelming hopelessness, and severe difficulty functioning in daily life. It does not sever a mother’s connection to reality.

Postpartum psychosis, on the other hand, is an exceptionally rare and catastrophic psychiatric emergency that strikes only one or two in a thousand new mothers. It is characterized by acute delusions, terrifying hallucinations, severe cognitive confusion, and a radical, devastating break with shared reality. That fundamental rupture separates it from common depressive episodes.

That monumental clinical distinction sits at the absolute center of the criminal trial currently unfolding inside Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts. Clancy’s defense attorneys argue she was actively psychotic when she killed her three children and therefore is not criminally responsible, while prosecutors argue she planned the killings and understood what she was doing.

Ultimately, a jury will be tasked with weighing the clinical evidence, examining expert testimony, and deciding her legal responsibility under the law. Yet outside the courthouse, vocal supporters have already rendered their verdict. They have substituted rigorous forensic evaluation and legal accountability with raw, unexamined emotional projection.

The Dangerous Myth of Shared Psychology

The women demonstrating outside the Plymouth courthouse, recognizing the exhaustion, depression, and isolation common in early motherhood, see something painfully familiar in Clancy’s story. That shared memory quickly metastasizes into an unearned assumption of total psychological alignment. In doing so, they turn personal grief into an impassioned defense of an accused killer.

What begins as a sympathetic “I know what that feels like” rapidly evolves into “I know what she felt,” until it inevitably solidifies into “That could have been me.” But observers point out that this rhetorical leap is deeply flawed, ignoring the clinical realities of maternal mental health and the facts of the case.

The vast majority of women who experience postpartum depression do not become psychotic, let alone kill their children. Those critical differences are central to understanding this case, yet Clancy’s supporters are actively blurring them. That confusion is deeply misleading, perilous, and unfair to struggling mothers everywhere.

That blurring is not merely a harmless semantic mistake; it is actively perilous for millions of mothers who struggle in silence. When supporters insist that “I could have been Lindsay,” they inadvertently place everyday postpartum depression in the exact same conversation as a horrific triple homicide.

Depression is simply not psychosis, and facing severe mental health struggles post-childbirth does not make a woman inherently dangerous to her family. Rather than reducing the stigma surrounding postpartum depression, Clancy’s fans risk worsening it. They end up linking common maternal suffering directly with unthinkable, lethal violence.

While their deep identification with her makes psychological sense on the surface, it also severely interferes with rational judgment. For many advocates, defending Clancy has ceased to be about the evidence presented at trial. It has instead become a subconscious vehicle for defending and validating their own painful experiences.

As supporters yelled words of encouragement to Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, as he arrived at Plymouth Superior Court, that defensive posture was on full display. When an individual sees herself reflected in Lindsay, questioning Lindsay’s actions can feel uncomfortably like questioning her own trauma and emotional survival.

In that defensive mindset, asking whether she was actually psychotic sounds like asking whether postpartum suffering itself is real. Even considering the possibility that she was criminally responsible for her children’s deaths can feel, to her supporters, like blaming women for being mentally ill.

The question, for them, then fundamentally changes from “What was happening in Lindsay Clancy’s mind?” to “Do you believe women when they say they’re suffering?” That rhetorical shift completely sidesteps the legal reality of a criminal trial. It replaces careful factual scrutiny with an emotional and ideological loyalty test.

This brand of over-identification carries severe psychological risks for everyone involved in the public discourse surrounding this trial. The more we see ourselves in another person, the easier it becomes to project our experience onto theirs. That projection creates a seductive illusion of shared psychology where none actually exists.

Erasing the Victims From the Story

There is another deeply troubling consequence of Clancy supporters’ over-identification: her three young children start to disappear entirely from view. As public discourse fixates obsessively on the mother’s mental health, her victims are quietly pushed into the background of their own deaths.

We and the jury are hearing extensive testimony about Lindsay’s suffering, her psychiatric medications, her medical treatment, her doctors, and whether anyone truly listened to her cries for help. While those are legitimate questions in a trial involving criminal responsibility, that focus has organized the entire narrative around the mother’s pain.

Amid all that testimony, Cora, Dawson, and Callan become supporting characters in a story structured almost entirely around their mother’s internal struggle. That illustrates an important corollary about empathy itself: human beings naturally focus their compassion on the person whose experience they can most easily imagine. We sympathize with the voice we can hear.

A mother can intimately remember being exhausted, depressed, or overwhelmed after childbirth, making it effortless to see pieces of herself in Lindsay. It is infinitely harder for her to identify with three small children who are no longer here to tell us what happened to them.

Healthy empathy should never require that tragic trade-off, nor should it demand that we erase the dead to comfort the living. We can believe Clancy suffered profoundly without declaring that she was or was not legally responsible for the deaths of her children. True empathy does not demand that we suspend our judgment.

We can believe postpartum illness deserves far greater clinical attention without turning one criminal defendant into a universal symbol for every woman who has struggled after childbirth. And we can have genuine compassion for mental illness without allowing that compassion to erase difficult questions about agency and responsibility. Both truths can exist at the same time.

A woman who recognizes herself in Clancy’s story could choose to draw a completely different, far more grounded lesson from this tragedy. She can look back at her own darkest moments and declare with clarity: I was depressed, and I wasn’t Lindsay. Her pain does not define the limits of maternal survival.

She can choose to say: I was overwhelmed, and I wasn’t Lindsay; I felt failed by doctors, and still I wasn’t Lindsay. Recognizing your own past despair does not require you to adopt another person’s fatal actions as your own potential fate.

Personal feelings and emotional resonance prove nothing about Clancy’s criminal responsibility in a court of law. Saying “I understand some of what she went through” is genuine empathy, but claiming “I could have been her” is a much broader, far more dangerous claim. It replaces clinical truth with an emotional fantasy.

The truly empathetic response does not require blurring medical realities or turning a triple homicide into a relatable maternal milestone. It does not demand that we forget Cora, Dawson, and Callan. The truly empathetic response is far simpler, clearer, and more honest: I believe you suffered, but I am not you.