Put Down Your Phone: What the Lindsay Clancy Case Is Teaching Us About Social Media and Maternal Mental Health
by Kristy Money, PhD, LP
I have been thinking about the Lindsay Clancy case a lot over the past few weeks.
I have very mixed feelings about the case itself. I wasn’t there, and I don’t know what was happening inside Lindsay’s mind when she killed her children. I don’t think anyone scrolling through social media from their couch can know that either. There are serious questions about postpartum psychosis, medication, criminal responsibility, and maternal mental illness, and I hope those questions are handled carefully.
What I keep thinking about, though, is social media. More specifically, I keep thinking about what happens when a horrific story involving maternal mental illness becomes an ongoing source of content for millions of people, while the companies delivering that content are financially incentivized to keep us watching.
That concerns me a lot.
I’m a psychologist, and I think about this stuff professionally. I’m also a woman who has spent a lot of my life thinking about motherhood, mental illness, Mormon culture, and what happens when people are psychologically vulnerable and don’t have very good insight into what is happening to them. I think we need to talk more seriously about what our phones are doing to us.
We are living inside the algorithm
Social media companies make money when we stay on their platforms. They make money when we click, scroll, comment, argue, share, react, and come back to see what happened while we were gone. The algorithm is constantly learning what gets our attention, and unfortunately, the things that get our attention are often the things that make us angry, afraid, fascinated, jealous, or upset.
The Lindsay Clancy case has all of those ingredients.
There are people discussing postpartum psychosis. There are people arguing about whether Lindsay was psychotic and whether she should be held criminally responsible. There are people talking about psychiatric medication, mothers sharing intrusive thoughts, people recreating intrusive thoughts on social media, and people making videos about the case and then responding to other people’s videos about the case.
If you watch one of those videos, the algorithm can give you another one. Then another. Eventually you can spend hours consuming information about something that is making you feel worse, while your phone is giving you the feeling that you are doing something useful because you are “learning” about the issue.
I think we need to be much more honest about the fact that these platforms are designed to keep our attention. They are businesses. Our engagement has monetary value.
This is especially concerning for mothers
Motherhood is already a vulnerable psychological time. Women can be exhausted, isolated, sleep deprived, overwhelmed, physically recovering from childbirth, struggling with their identity, experiencing anxiety or depression, having intrusive thoughts, or, in some cases, becoming seriously psychiatrically ill.
And then we give them a tiny computer that they carry around all day.
You can wake up at 3:00 a.m. with a crying baby and immediately start scrolling. You can have an intrusive thought and immediately search for what it means. You can feel like a terrible mother and find hundreds of other mothers who appear to have everything figured out. You can become frightened about your own mental health and spend the next four hours reading about exactly the thing that scares you.
I don’t think we have fully thought through what this does to people, particularly people who are already struggling.
The Corie Walsh case really got my attention
The Corie Walsh case came out while the Lindsay Clancy jury was deliberating, and it hit me hard.
Walsh has been charged in the death of her two-year-old son. Prosecutors say she told police that she believed her son was the devil and the anti-Christ. Her attorney has said she was experiencing a psychotic episode.
There have also been reports that she had been following and discussing the Lindsay Clancy case shortly before her son’s death.
I want to be very careful here. There is no evidence that the Lindsay Clancy case caused what happened to Walsh, and I don’t think it is responsible to turn two horrible cases into a simple story about social media causing psychosis.
At the same time, I don’t think we should ignore how psychologically powerful repeated exposure to this kind of material can be. If someone is already becoming paranoid or psychotic, and their phone keeps feeding them material about psychosis, murder, evil children, postpartum mental illness, and other people’s interpretations of those things, I think it is completely reasonable to be concerned about the effect.
We should be studying this.
I think we need a cooling-off period
So I’m going to make a very practical recommendation.
If you or someone you love is struggling with the emotional ramifications of the Lindsay Clancy case, delete the social media apps from your phone for a while.
You don’t have to delete your accounts or disappear from the internet. If you need Facebook Marketplace, use your laptop. If you need to check a message occasionally, use your laptop. If you need social media for work, use your laptop.
The point is to put some friction between yourself and the algorithm.
There needs to be a cooling-off period. You don’t need to know what everyone on the internet thinks about this case every fifteen minutes. You don’t need to watch another video or read another comment or find the newest theory. There will still be news tomorrow.
Make your phone boring
Another thing I recommend is switching your phone to grayscale.
There is a lot of discussion online about dopamine and color, and some of the claims get oversimplified. Color itself isn’t a magical dopamine button. What we do know is that smartphones and apps are intentionally designed to be visually stimulating, and removing color can make the device less appealing and less rewarding to interact with. For someone trying to break the automatic habit of picking up their phone every few minutes, that can be surprisingly helpful.
Basically, make your phone boring.
On an iPhone
Go to:
Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Color Filters → turn Color Filters on → Grayscale
You can also use Screen Time to set limits for individual apps and Focus to reduce interruptions.
On Android
On many Android phones, you can find grayscale through:
Settings → Digital Wellbeing & parental controls → Bedtime mode → Customize → Screen options at bedtime → Grayscale
Android also has Focus mode, which allows you to pause distracting apps and notifications.
The exact menus vary depending on your phone and Android version, so if you can’t find it, search “grayscale” in your Settings.
Your phone doesn’t need to hijack your nervous system
We have created a situation where almost every uncomfortable feeling can immediately be followed by reaching for our phones. If I’m bored, I can reach for my phone. If I’m lonely, I can reach for my phone. If I’m anxious, I can reach for my phone. If I can’t sleep, I can reach for my phone. If I’m worried about my children, I can reach for my phone.
And then the phone gives me an endless supply of information about whatever I am already worried about.
I don’t think that is good for us.
I don’t think our brains were designed to consume an endless stream of emotionally intense information all day long. I am particularly concerned about what happens when the person consuming that information is already psychologically vulnerable.
Then there is the jury
The jury in the Lindsay Clancy case ultimately deadlocked, resulting in a mistrial. Three jurors have since spoken publicly about the deliberations, and there have been reports that jurors had different understandings of what was permitted regarding social media during the trial.
That is deeply concerning to me.
I am not saying social media caused the mistrial. I am saying that the fact that we are even having to ask questions about what jurors were seeing online during one of the most emotionally charged trials in the country should make us stop and think.
We are living in an environment where information follows us. You don’t necessarily have to go looking for something. The algorithm can find you, and once something gets your attention, it can keep finding you.
That has implications far beyond this one trial. I think it has implications for our individual and collective psyche.
And I think Mormon women have an extra layer of this
I think about this a lot in the context of Mormon motherhood.
For many LDS women, motherhood isn’t simply one role among many. It can become deeply tied to identity, worthiness, spirituality, and whether you feel like you’re succeeding as a woman.
That creates an enormous amount of pressure.
Social media has also created a way for us to compare ourselves to thousands of other mothers every single day. We see the beautiful house, the clean children, the perfect family pictures, the spiritual motherhood posts, and the woman who seems to have figured out how to be endlessly patient and grateful and sexually fulfilled and emotionally regulated.
Meanwhile, you’re sitting on the bathroom floor wondering why you haven’t showered in three days.
I think this is especially relevant for Mormon Mental Health because so many women already carry an enormous amount of shame around not feeling the way they think they are supposed to feel. Then they open their phones and get several more hours of evidence that everyone else is doing motherhood better than they are.
That isn’t harmless.
If you are actually struggling, please get help
There is an important distinction between being upset by a case and becoming psychiatrically unwell because of what you are experiencing. If you are having intrusive thoughts that feel increasingly difficult to control, going without sleep, feeling paranoid, becoming convinced that other people are sending you messages through media or technology, hearing or seeing things other people don’t, feeling detached from reality, or becoming afraid that you might hurt yourself or someone else, please don’t try to manage that by yourself or by continuing to consume information online.
Tell someone in your real life what is happening and ask them to stay with you. Contact your physician, therapist, psychiatrist, or another qualified mental health professional. If you are postpartum and experiencing a significant change in sleep, thinking, mood, or perception, please tell your medical provider specifically that you are concerned about a postpartum mental health crisis.
If you think you may hurt yourself or someone else, or you cannot keep yourself or someone else safe, call or text 988 in the United States and Canada for immediate crisis support, or call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department if there is an immediate danger. If someone is experiencing possible psychosis, particularly postpartum psychosis, I would treat that as an emergency rather than waiting to see whether it passes.
Getting off social media is not a substitute for treatment when someone is experiencing a psychiatric crisis. It is simply one thing we can do to reduce the amount of psychological noise surrounding us.
We need to learn how to step away
I don’t have a grand solution for social media (beyond that the industry needs to be regulated, and there are no signs that’s ever going to happen because it’s too lucrative for billionaires). And I don’t think everyone needs to throw their phone into the ocean. I do think we need to become much more intentional about how much of our mental life we hand over to these devices.
There are times when stepping away is a mental health intervention.
If you are pregnant or postpartum and struggling with intrusive thoughts, anxiety, depression, insomnia, or anything that feels psychologically frightening, please talk to an actual person. A doctor, therapist, psychiatrist, partner, friend, or someone else who can sit next to you and help you figure out what is actually happening.
Please don’t let TikTok become your psychiatrist. Please don’t let an algorithm become the person you turn to when you are scared.
And if you are currently consumed by the Lindsay Clancy case, it is okay to stop. You can care about maternal mental health without watching every video about maternal mental health. You can care about what happened to those children without consuming every detail. You can wait for the legal process to unfold yet again.
Put your phone down. Turn the screen gray. Go outside. Talk to somebody. Sleep. Eat something. Let your brain have some quiet.
The internet will still be there tomorrow.
Your brain needs you today.