What the Lindsay Clancy case reveals about toxic femininity

Hundreds of women looked at Lindsay Clancy, a mother who killed her three young children, and thought: That could have been me.

As a psychotherapist, that identification concerns me. Not because these women were supporting murder. They weren’t. Many recognized their own experiences with postpartum depression, anxiety, exhaustion, or feeling failed by doctors in Clancy’s story. But recognizing something familiar in another person’s suffering is very different from concluding that you could have become her.