Lindsay Clancy and the problem of therapy culture

Lindsay Clancy is a 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who has confessed to murdering all three of her children. Her trial has attracted much attention on social media, not just for the obvious reason of grim fascination, but for Ms. Clancy’s defense. She contends that her postpartum psychosis is responsible for her actions. She’s testified that she heard a voice telling her to kill the children, and that at the time of the killings, she was suffering from extreme mental illness and a shocking cocktail of psychiatric medications.

Clancy’s defense is obviously controversial, and for the same reason common to nearly all insanity pleas in cases of murder. It is no easy thing to weigh the reality of moral agency alongside the reality of mental illness.

Complexities and social media, however, do not usually get along. Followers of Clancy’s trial have taken to various platforms to voice just about every take you can imagine—from denying the existence of psychosis at all, to blaming Clancy’s actions on the patriarchy and capitalism. “Someone said something crazy online” is hardly news. What’s more interesting is the way Clancy's trial is once again revealing the dysfunctional influence of digital media—especially when it comes to mental health.

Clancy-related content has been especially prevalent on TikTok. Many posts call for “support” or sympathy for Clancy, on the logic that most people do not sufficiently understand or care about the psychological tolls of motherhood. Hundreds of women recently gathered outside the Plymouth courthouse to show solidarity for Clancy. One pro-Clancy demonstrator told NBC News that “Women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored when we speak up. We’re scared because nobody takes us seriously.” A series of viral TikTok videos show women screaming and throwing things as a way of expressing their own postpartum symptoms.

Two things can be true at once. Postpartum mental illness is real and can be horrible. And, making Lindsay Clancy a symbol of feminine oppression is misguided and opportunistic. Much of the polarized discourse around the Clancy case reflects the invasive influence of therapy culture.

Clancy’s supporters seem less interested in the facts of the case than the symbolic significance of a woman whose claims of deep suffering are met with suspicion. There are, of course, many who need more people to believe and help their suffering. Yet it’s also true that mental illness is in a weird place right now. Its diagnostic boundaries are expanding right alongside its social currency. The collapse of mental health into categories of identity is making many people sicker, lonelier, and less morally responsible.

As medical doctor and missionary Matthew Loftus argues in his new book Resisting Therapy Culture, modern discourse on mental illness portrays sufferers as empty vessels of victimhood rather than a complicated mixture of physical, emotional, and spiritual realities. “Therapy culture often discounts any possibility that our choices and our response to suffering have any real significance,” Loftus writes.

Pop therapy culture is omnipresent online. TikTok especially is known for algorithmically boosting videos that romanticize self-diagnosis of depression, ADHD, and other conditions. Importantly, addiction to infinite scroll content correlates strongly with feelings of anxiety and insecurity, especially in women. Thus, many American women who spend a lot of time in algorithmic social media are experiencing worse mental health at the same time they are encouraged by content mills and lifestyle influencers to see what’s happening to them not as an issue of habit or character, but as an immutable personality trait that deserves to be accepted and accommodated.

This could help explain why so many online accounts describe Lindsay Clancy’s trial, not as a tragic collision of sickness and evil, but as a clear-cut example of discrimination against women and their struggles. Digital media’s most widely shared mental health tropes set people up to feel the solidarity of shared clinical categories more keenly than the heaviness of murder.

Therapy culture does not have the seriousness to account for human nature. Some right-wing pundits have reacted to Clancy's supporters by going completely the other direction, suggesting that postpartum mental illness is fake or irrelevant. This mistake is just another kind of therapy culture, which offers its own comfort that reasonable, “good” people have no reason to worry that their minds might suddenly seriously delude them. Christians understand that human beings are bodies, and these bodies do not always do what our souls want them to.

It’s easy to think these are just remote social media fights that have low stakes in the real world. But the complexities of the body and soul matter to anyone who wants to understand and help others. This column cannot be Lindsay Clancy’s judge or jury. The point is that modern myths like therapy culture are potent in a society that doesn’t know what people are, what they’re made for, or how to make them flourish. So potent, in fact, that not even the dead bodies of children are guaranteed to break their illusions.