The Cognitive Dissonance Behind the Lindsay Clancy Debate

I honestly cannot believe how divided the internet is over Lindsay Clancy. In my mind, a woman killing her three children is unacceptable no matter the circumstances, and she should be held accountable and confined somewhere appropriate… whether that is prison or a secure psychiatric institution.

I think this is exactly why it is so hard for some people to reconcile. How can someone be described as a loving, caring mother and still kill her children? In most people’s minds, those two things should not be able to exist at the same time. So when they do, people start looking for another explanation because the reality is impossible to sit with.

I think a huge part of the reactions we’re seeing—the people saying she didn’t do it, that Patrick did it and framed her, that somebody else did it, or giving her a pass because she was “failed,” comes down to cognitive dissonance.

Because it is HORRIFYING to accept that a well-educated woman with a medical background, money, access to doctors, a supportive husband who arranged to work from home so he could help, BOTH sets of grandparents willing to be involved and help, and who by all accounts had been a good mother who loved her children could STILL end up doing something this horrific and unimaginable.

I think that contradiction is what makes this case so difficult for people to sit with.

We want “loving mother” and “mother who killed her children” to be mutually exclusive because psychologically, it feels like they should be. And when the facts do not fit comfortably into that belief, people start looking for another explanation… she was failed, someone else did it, Patrick framed her, the doctors caused it—anything that makes what happened feel a little easier to comprehend.

But sometimes the most horrifying part is that the reality itself IS uncomfortable and incredibly difficult to reconcile.

Our entire lives, we’re told to get an education so we can have a good career, work hard, build a stable life, find a supportive partner, have a family, surround ourselves with people who will help, and have access to good doctors and resources. Doing all of those things is supposed to make life easier and give us a better chance of handling whatever comes our way.

And then you look at a case like this…

Someone seemingly had so many of the things we’re all told are supposed to make life safer, easier, and more stable… education, money, a career, access to doctors, family support, a spouse actively trying to help, grandparents willing to step in…

And this STILL happened.

I think that genuinely scares people.

Because it completely clashes with this idea that if you build the “right” life and have enough support, enough resources, enough education, and enough access to care, there should be some level of protection from everything completely falling apart or from becoming so deeply unhappy or unwell that you end up destroying your own life along with your children’s.

So, for some people, it becomes easier to say: “She was failed. Nobody helped her. The doctors failed her. The system failed her.”

And some people go even further. They say she didn’t do it at all. That Patrick did it and framed her. That somebody else did it. That there HAS to be some other explanation, because the idea that a mother with all of those resources and all of that support around her could actually do something this horrific to her own children is too difficult to accept.

That’s where I think the cognitive dissonance really comes in.

Because if she was simply failed by everyone around her, then there’s still an explanation that makes sense. There’s still something you can point to and say, “Well, THAT’S why this happened.”

But the scarier reality is that someone can have education, money, a career, access to doctors, family support, a spouse actively trying to help, grandparents willing to step in… and something like this can still happen.

There’s another part of the “she was failed” argument that bothers me, too: she was a labor and delivery nurse. She was not someone with zero medical knowledge who had no idea postpartum mental-health issues existed or that medications can interact with each other and affect your mental state. She had a medical background and understood how important it is for doctors to have a complete and accurate medication history.

Yet, from what has been presented in this case, she was seeing multiple providers and was not always giving them the full picture of what medications she was taking or what other doctors were prescribing.

So at what point do we acknowledge that the people treating her could only work with the information they were actually given?

You cannot simultaneously say, “The doctors failed her,” while ignoring that doctors cannot properly evaluate medications, interactions, side effects, or treatment decisions without a complete picture from the patient. That does not mean every doctor made every decision perfectly, and it does not mean the medical system is above criticism.

But it DOES mean her own participation in that process matters too.

And that’s what gets lost when the entire conversation becomes, “Poor Lindsay, nobody helped her.”

People WERE trying to help her. Her husband was trying to help her. Her family was involved. She had access to medical care. The question isn’t simply whether help existed… it’s also what she did with that help and whether the people trying to treat her were being given everything they needed to do it properly.

That’s also why the “she just didn’t have enough help” explanation is bullshit. There are countless women who do NOT have the money, education, family support, involved partner, access to specialists, or other resources she had, and they STILL do not kill their children.

That doesn’t mean lack of support, postpartum mental illness, medication issues, or inadequate care can’t make someone’s situation dramatically worse. Of course they can.

But those things cannot automatically explain away what happened or remove all accountability, because plenty of people live through incredibly difficult circumstances WITHOUT‍ ‍killing their children.

And then comes the question nobody really wants to sit with:

If someone with ALL of those advantages and all of that support can still end up here, what does that say about this idea that doing everything “right” is somehow supposed to protect you from your life completely falling apart?

There absolutely should be conversations about postpartum mental health, medications, doctors, treatment decisions, and whether the medical system could have done things differently.

But there is a HUGE difference between discussing what may have contributed to something and using those things to completely explain away what happened.

And there is also a huge difference between debating someone’s mental state or criminal responsibility and saying she simply didn’t do it at all.

I really think, for some people, accepting that a mother could actually do this to her own children despite having so many of the things we’re all told are supposed to protect us and make life more manageable—is simply too difficult to process.

So instead, they find another explanation.

And to me, that’s exactly why people’s reactions to this case are so divided. It isn’t necessarily that everyone is looking at completely different facts. I think some people are trying to make those facts fit into a version of the world that feels less terrifying to them.

And THAT is where I think the cognitive dissonance comes in and what we’re watching happen on a massive scale with this case.

People are being confronted with facts that do not fit comfortably with what they believe SHOULD be true, so instead of changing the belief, they change the explanation.