When Stormi Griffin posted a photograph of herself smiling with her baby boy on her lap, she wasn’t showcasing the picture-perfect motherhood she once dreamed of. She was pulling back the curtain on a condition that defies easy understanding: postpartum psychosis.
“You can look completely fine,” Griffin, 23, told The Independent. “It’s not just a crazy lady rocking herself in a straitjacket.”
The stark image went viral as the murder trial of Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy thrust postpartum mental illness into the national spotlight. Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, stands accused of killing her three children—Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan—before attempting to take her own life at their Duxbury home in January 2023. Her defence team argues she is not criminally responsible, blaming the killings on an acute onset of postpartum psychosis. The prosecution paints a different picture: premeditated, deliberate murder.
Now, mothers across America are speaking out about their own battles with postpartum mental health crises, demanding the world understand what they describe as systematic failures in maternal healthcare.
The Invisible Symptoms of Postpartum Psychosis
Griffin, a former medical assistant turned dance teacher from Paris, Texas, experienced postpartum psychosis last year, months after giving birth to her son Ethan. The condition—classified as a medical emergency occurring in approximately one to two women per 1,000 births worldwide—is linked to hormonal upheaval, sleep deprivation, and the crushing stresses that follow childbirth.
Unlike postpartum depression, which affects roughly one in seven mothers, psychosis represents the extreme end of the spectrum. At its worst, Griffin heard voices. She saw things that weren’t there. She lost touch with what she knew to be real.
“I heard voices that almost sounded like me, and then voices that I’ve never heard,” Griffin recalled. “It made me question reality. The best way to describe it is it felt like I had an alter ego who just kept popping up, and the inside of me was like, ‘This isn’t right. This isn’t you.'”
Her colleagues at the paediatric office where she worked noticed something was wrong. They called her husband, Blake, and together they sat her down and asked the question no one had asked before: what was going on?
“I’m hearing voices, and I know they’re not there. I’m seeing things,” Griffin told them.
That intervention saved her life, she believes. But even with help, the psychosis didn’t release its grip easily. Mood stabilisers eventually pulled her back to reality, though she acknowledges the terrifying truth about her condition.
“As much as I’m terrified of the sentence, I was a danger to myself. I was a danger to others,” Griffin said. “I could have easily been a danger to my children. And if I didn’t have that help, if I didn’t have those people fighting for me, I’m confident that I would not be here.”
A System Built for Judgment, Not Healing
Wendy Davis, executive director of Postpartum Support International, describes what mental health professionals call “masking”—the exhausting performance mothers maintain while crumbling inside.
“She could be going about everyday tasks and errands while having intrusive thoughts, hearing voices,” Davis explained. “From the outside, it’s often impossible to tell that things are very hard for her, that she’s suffering and possibly in danger. And the mother herself might not realize what she is experiencing is a mental health disorder that is temporary and treatable.”
The gap between suffering and diagnosis can be fatal. When Sarah Curtis, 37, was home alone with a newborn and a toddler a decade ago, disturbing thoughts consumed her.
“Anytime I would get in the car, I would envision a semi truck hitting us. I would get up constantly in the middle of the night because I was so scared someone was either coming in their window or watching through their window, kidnapping them out of their beds, or they would have a seizure and stop breathing,” Curtis recalled.
Five years passed before a panic attack finally forced her to confide in her husband, a military veteran, who brought her to his therapist. She was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder, OCD, and panic disorder—all stemming, doctors determined, from postpartum illness left unaddressed.
“I am in no way minimising the devastating loss of three innocent children,” Curtis said carefully. “What we are supporting is the fact that this mom was begging for help and she was failed by her providers. I think about how differently my own story could have ended if someone hadn’t finally listened.”
Her postnatal checkup two days after discharge lasted all of 30 minutes. The six-week follow-up focused more on contraception than mental wellbeing. “Because that’s when I started really getting into darker thoughts and anxious,” she said. “But we don’t have anything.”
The Controversy at the Heart of the Case
The Lindsay Clancy trial has split public opinion. Supporters wearing pink T-shirts reading “She Needed Help” pack the courtroom, offering solidarity to a woman they see as a victim of her own mind. Critics call her a monster. Both can’t be right—and both might be missing the point.
Prosecutors allege Clancy lied to mental healthcare providers about her dark thoughts, deliberately skipped correct medication dosages, and received “an abundance of help, an abundance of care.” The healthcare system, they insist, “is not on trial here.”
Clancy’s defence attorney, Kevin Reddington, counters that her mental health deteriorated because of “that damned medicine and the lousy medical care that she got.”
Griffin listens to these arguments with the peculiar clarity of someone who has walked the same dark path. She knows how close she came to catastrophe.
“I absolutely would have hurt myself, possibly someone else,” she admitted. “Whether that was in a fit of rage and I wrecked my car into someone, if I intentionally took my own life, and if I could have been in a rage and snapped at my children out of despair and depression, which is why I’m so grateful that everyone else around me was able to see that I was not ok and take what I said seriously.”
She believes luck played an enormous role in her survival. “It’s why the Lindsay Clancy trial is heartbreaking… to know that I went through something so similar, and so many doors were busted down for me. And to know that there was another woman who went through that who didn’t have the same is why it’s so controversial and upsetting.”
For Onna Wallace, 38, from Madison, Wisconsin, following the trial means confronting her own descent into postpartum darkness eight years ago. A difficult pregnancy and traumatic birth with her son Lachlan shattered the motherhood fantasy she’d carried since childhood.
“The second they laid that baby on my chest, it was like a switch flipped. It was just the strangest feeling, and I just wanted them to take that baby away from me,” Wallace said.
Postpartum preeclampsia compounded her crisis. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. She felt utterly alone despite her family’s presence.
“I was so embarrassed, and it just got to a point where I wanted to die,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to hurt my child. I wanted to hurt myself.”
A text to a crisis support number saved her. “Just to have somebody say, ‘You’re a good mom, you’re not alone, this is okay, and other moms feel this way too.’ I’d never heard that before.”
When excerpts from Clancy’s journal were read aloud—descriptions of “drowning every day” and feeling “completely overwhelmed trying to take care of the three kids”—Wallace couldn’t continue.
“I just was like, this will break me to read, because I know exactly how she was feeling,” Wallace said. “I just could not fathom being in that much of a darkness. I think just how terribly she was failed by the medical system.”
Why it Matters
The Lindsay Clancy trial is more than a murder case—it is a reckoning with how America treats mothers in crisis. While prosecutors and defence attorneys battle over intent and responsibility, hundreds of thousands of women navigate a healthcare landscape that asks too little, too late. The voices of Stormi Griffin, Onna Wallace, and Sarah Curtis cut through the courtroom drama with a simple, damning truth: mothers are suffering in silence while the system designed to catch them looks elsewhere. Postpartum psychosis is temporary and treatable—yet without recognition, without intervention, without genuine support, it becomes a death sentence for mothers and children alike. The question isn’t whether Lindsay Clancy deserves compassion or condemnation. The question is why so many women are being left to spiral alone until tragedy becomes inevitable. The answer will determine whether America’s maternal healthcare system finally evolves—or remains a monument to institutional failure.
