Mad or Mad? - by Big Dee

When this TwoCents prompt came up, I didn't even know who Lindsay Clancy was and just like I do, I didn't just jump online to catch feelings or join a mob, I went looking for the facts. I saw she had three children. I saw the heartbreaking reality of what happened on January 24, 2023... but maybe I am looking at this differently because I have had my own experience with depression. Lindsay was a labour and delivery nurse, a woman who helped other women bring children into the world, a woman who had gone through pregnancy herself, a woman who had experienced the physical and emotional reality of motherhood and that is what makes this case so difficult for me. Because when someone asks me, "What could make a mother do this?" I can only wrap my head, around mental illness... but before I even get there, I remember something my aunt, an auxiliary nurse, once told me during one of our random conversations. She told me about two women who gave birth with her and she couldn't get the incidents out of her mind, one was her close friend.. the other was a patient the hospital asked her to handle. For her friend, she said her friend was very healthy and could see clearly before having a child which was her first but after birthing the child, her friend afterwards battled with partial blindness. For the patient, she gave birth to her two children at their hospital in Badagry general hospital, after giving birth to her first child she started battling terrible migraines which they managed with drugs.. After her second child, the woman's headache intensified that she started talking strangely sometimes, screaming from the headaches and wasn't very stable like before. Because her family was poor, they couldn't afford proper medical help, so her husband was left struggling alone with the children most times. My aunt always said that giving birth is a battlefield. Women go through things, it has to do with major body changes, and it's not a joke and she said that’s why in our part of the world, pregnancy and postpartum are never taken lightly. People run to prayer houses because we know how thin the line of sanity and losing a life or lives can become when a woman brings life into the world. If there's anything I learned from depression as someone who was once there.. I know, it's like a junior sibling to mental illness, and mental illness does not always look like what people think it looks like. You can be talking to someone today and laughing with them, and have no idea what is happening inside their head. We have seen suicide cases involving people who looked healthy, smart, functional and completely fine from the outside. So what happened to them? I don't think we can always look at someone from the outside and know what is happening inside their mind?.. I think sometimes, the mind gets to a place where it no longer sees things the way we do from the outside and that is what makes this case so difficult for me. A mentally unwell person does not always look "mad." Sometimes, the madness is happening where nobody else can see it, and if we want to be fair and not one-sided, we have to face another hard truth: sometimes, a person can be struggling long before the day of a tragedy and the people around them may not fully understand how serious it has become until it's in full display.. Before that terrible day, people looked at Lindsay and thought she was fine. She was a labour and delivery nurse, but postpartum psychosis doesn't always look like someone screaming on the streets.. maybe sometimes, it hides behind a beautiful made up face and a stack of prescription drugs. In the months before the killings, she was seeking psychiatric help and had been prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications by multiple providers. Her defence argued that her deteriorating mental state and treatment played a major role in what happened and the prosecution disputed that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis when she killed her children. This brings us to the big question: when a mother does something this horrific, should severe mental illness completely remove criminal responsibility, or should she still face consequences? There is a wise Yoruba proverb that says: If two woods fall on each other, one must be lifted before the other. Look at what we have here. Two heavy woods have fallen on each other: 1. Three innocent children are dead, and that demands justice and accountability.2. Her mind may have been hijacked by an illness that stole her grip on reality before she even touched those children. People want simple answers. They want to call her a cold-blooded monster, or completely focus on her illness and forget that three children died but real justice requires us to hold both truths. If a person's mind was genuinely shattered by severe psychosis, treating that person exactly like someone who was mentally sound and deliberately chose to kill ignores something important but saying "mental illness" and moving on as though nothing happened ignores the children too. So where does that leave us? Complete freedom leaves a gaping hole for the innocent lives lost but ordinary punishment for a mind severely affected by mental illness can also ignore the reality of what severe mental illness can do. Accountability here should mean more than revenge, or just following the law "an eye for an eye", it should also mean acknowledging the horror of what happened, protecting society, taking the mental illness seriously, and asking hard questions about the medical care that came before the tragedy. We have to look at the broken system, the shattered mind, and the lost children all at once. Maybe, sometimes justice is not about choosing which truth hurts less.. maybe, it is about having the courage to face all of them.

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