All Mothers Are Lindsay Clancy
In the US, one in five pregnant or postpartum women are diagnosed with mood or anxiety disorder during the perinatal period. Not only that, one in eight women report symptoms of depression after giving birth.
Lindsay Clancy consistently pleaded for help, a scan over her case which has released information on therapy treatments shows multiple events where she had sought help, support and tangible resources to survive her postpartum illness.
I say “All Mothers Are Lindsay Clancy” because right now this mother is being blamed for her clinically neglected illness. She was neglected by her providers and dosed with medications that most likely intensified any instablities she had been experiencing, and at best the acted as a bandaid until they just could not anymore.
Her children were also failed by the providers. Anyone working in the clinical field providing care for new parents knows that postpartum psychosis and depression are extremely treatable. The earlier intervention is implemented the higher chance at saving the lives of parents and children. Anyone working in the perinatal field who does not know that - shouldn’t be in that field, or needs to get educated fast, because people and children are dying and have been.
Access to therapy and support is not getting any easier either, “the federal government’s mental health and substance abuse referral line fielded 833,598 calls in 2020, 27 percent more than in 2019, before the pandemic began. In 2021, the number rose again, to 1.02 million. When the American Psychological Association surveyed its members last fall, it found a surge in demand and new referrals, particularly for anxiety, depressive and trauma-related disorders. Yet 65 percent of the more than 1,100 psychologists who responded said they had no capacity for new patients and 68 percent said their wait lists were longer than they were in 2020.” (Washington Post 2022)
Standard postpartum Care in America looks like this: One checkup at 4-6 weeks
…..thats it. Anything beyond that and outside of that you sometimes have to fight for. Even an hour after birth getting asked if you are feeling okay about your birth or needing help feeding doesn’t happen in most cases unless you have a unique provider. Postpartum changes more than your perineum and body. It changes your mind, quite literally, “In particular, gray matter shrinks in areas involved in processing and responding to social signals. This may mean that new mothers' brains are more efficiently wired in areas that allow them, for instance, to respond to their infant's needs or to detect threatening people in their environments. “ (Science.org 2016), which to me means mothers become more sensitive to their surroundings, more vigilant, more protective, more vulnerable emotionally due to this physiologically induced level of focus.
For a new parent, especially a mother, being left during this tender period with no attention to her emotional experiences and beyond, is incredibly overwhelming for most families, wether it is their first, second or third child.
And that compounds when a parent is facing other adversities like neurodivergency, physical disablities, birth trauma, sexual trauma etc.
You are not broken for having a negative or difficult response to parenting - you are in need of support
Lindsay Clancy did everything she could - she asked for support humbly when most people would not have had the care to do that. She deserved better and so did her children, any of us could have been her, experiencing chemical imbalance only to be ignored and told she was fine by multiple professionals.
The pillars of postpartum are preparation and support. To build your pillars - reach out to me via email or through my contact form for more information. You are not alone.
