Lindsay Clancy fans are fooling themselves with false empathy

“I could have been Lindsay Clancy.”That’s been the refrain of countless women who see their own postpartum suffering in Clancy, the Massachusetts mother now on trial for the murder of her three small children.They characterize it as empathy, but they miss a crucial distinction: Recognizing yourself in someone’s story isn’t the same as knowing her mind.“I was depressed too; I felt dismissed by doctors too,” they say, in public rallies and on social media.“I know what she went through.” But two women can suffer in similar ways without having the same illness — or the same relationship to reality.Clancy’s supporters are overlooking those distinctions.That’s distorting how they understand the Clancy case.Their reactions risk reinforcing the stigma surrounding postpartum depression — and push her three children to the margins of the story.Too many of us are discussing postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis as though they’re the same thing.They aren’t: Postpartum depression, which affects roughly one in eight new mothers, can bring profound sadness, anxiety, hopelessness and difficulty functioning.Postpartum psychosis, which affects only one or two in a thousand, can involve delusions, hallucinations, severe confusion and a break with reality.Clancy’s defense attorneys argue she was psychotic when she killed her three children and therefore isn’t criminally responsible; prosecutors argue she planned the killings and understood what she was doing.A jury will decide.The women demonstrating outside the Plymouth, Mass., courthouse, recognizing the exhaustion, depression and isolation common in early motherhood, see something familiar in Clancy’s story.“I know what that feels like” becomes “I know what she felt” — and soon, “That could have been me.”But the vast majority of women who experience postpartum depression don’t become psychotic, let alone kill their children.Those differences are central to understanding...