Which Mothers Do We Choose to Understand?
Saturday, August 22, 2026. This is for Jenn, who asked me to write about it.
Two Massachusetts mothers killed their children.
There is no graceful way into that sentence.
Lindsay Clancy, of Duxbury, is accused of killing her three children in 2023.
Her defense argues that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and could not appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing.
Latarsha Sanders, of Brockton, was convicted in 2022 of killing her two sons.
Her lawyers also argued that she was psychotic and not criminally responsible.
This month, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court threw out Sanders’s convictions and ordered a new trial, concluding that jurors had been prevented from seeing important psychiatric evidence.
And there is a remarkable overlap.
The same judge who presided over Sanders’s trial is now presiding over Clancy’s.
The cases are not the same.
But placed beside each other, they ask a question larger than either defendant:
Which mothers do we readily imagine as sick, and which do we imagine as monstrous?
Clancy’s case sits squarely inside the maternal-mental-health conversation.
Her defense argues that childbirth was followed by severe psychiatric deterioration, including psychosis.
Sanders’s illness appears broader and more chronic.
That distinction matters.
But the cases meet at one deeply uncomfortable point.
Can someone behave in an organized way while profoundly psychotic?
Most of us carry a crude picture of psychosis.
Someone incoherent.
Someone visibly detached from reality.
Someone who could not possibly make dinner, answer a text, drive a car, or put a child to bed.
But a person can do all of those things and still believe something that is not true with absolute conviction.
That matters because we often confuse organization with sanity.
They are not the same thing.
There is another distinction worth making.
A mother experiencing intrusive thoughts may suddenly imagine harming her baby and be horrified by the thought.
The horror is important.
She recognizes the thought as unwanted.
She does not believe it.
Psychosis can be different.
A command may feel as though it came from somewhere else.
A delusion may not feel like a thought at all.
At the far end of that disturbance, a mother may even believe that harming a child is somehow protecting the child.
This is why postpartum psychosis is not merely an especially severe postpartum depression.
It is a psychiatric emergency.
But the Clancy and Sanders cases become even more revealing when we look at how the two mothers have been received.
Clancy has attracted substantial public sympathy and visible support centered on mental illness and failures of care.
Sanders was treated very differently.
At her first trial, prosecutors called her evil and accused her of playing the “crazy card.”
Now Massachusetts’s highest court has ruled that the jury deciding her criminal responsibility did not see important psychiatric evidence.
That does not mean Sanders and Clancy should receive the same verdict.
It does mean we should notice the difference in the stories we tell about them.
Who gets the presumption of illness?
Who gets the presumption of evil?
Race, class, profession, demeanor, family presentation, access to psychiatric care, and the ability to attract articulate advocates may all influence which story the public is prepared to believe.
We should be careful here.
It is easy to turn two complicated cases into a morality play of our own.
But the contrast is difficult to ignore.
We have become considerably better at talking about postpartum depression.
We understand anxiety better than we once did.
We have even begun to understand that frightening intrusive thoughts do not necessarily mean a mother wants to harm her child.
Psychosis remains harder.
Perhaps because it asks us to tolerate something the culture does not handle particularly well:
A person can do something horrifying without fitting neatly into the category of monster.
That does not erase the dead children.
It does not erase responsibility.
It does not tell a jury what verdict to return.
It simply refuses the comfort of pretending that evil and illness are always easy to tell apart.
Good mother.
Bad mother.
Sick woman.
Murderer.
These are useful words until reality refuses to stay inside them.
A mother killed her children.
The law still has to decide whether the mind that did it understood what it was doing.
That is a harder question than deciding who deserves to be called a monster.
Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.