My story and hers are proof women are not believed in the health care setting. We cannot begin to truly help women until our words are seen as stronger than our providers’ perception of us.
What happens after the Lindsay Clancy verdict?
Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is nearing its end, and USA TODAY’s Melina Khan breaks down what happens after the jury decides her fate.
In the wake of my two pregnancies, I didn’t find myself in need of mental health treatment, and for that I am very thankful. But though my postpartum story is nothing like that of Lindsay Clancy’s, her experience reminds me of my own struggles because we have one thing in common: Health care providers didn’t listen to our cries for help.
In a 2025 survey, 93% of women reported feeling dismissed when seeking medical help. In 2005, I became one of them. After completing my undergraduate studies and while awaiting the start of graduate school, my nervous system crumbled overnight. I went to bed one evening in the fully functioning body I’d always known, only to awaken the next morning with angry pain and stiffness running down my legs.
“Have a banana,” the emergency room physician suggested upon finding my potassium was slightly low. “Everything else looks fine. You’re OK.” Those words were repeated by countless doctors for more than a decade, but they were far from reassuring.
Like Clancy, I knew something was wrong, but my words weren’t enough to receive the health care I so desperately needed.
I know what it’s like to have cries for medical help go unanswered
From September 2022 until January 2023, Clancy repeatedly sought help for severe postpartum depression, insomnia and anxiety. From seeing outpatient providers to emergency room visits to calling a suicide hotline multiple times and receiving voluntary inpatient treatment, she sought help for her overwhelming mental health symptoms.
Like me, Clancy knew she needed help, and she wanted to get better more than anything.
Dr. Alia Goodheart, the psychiatrist treating Clancy during an inpatient stay at McLean Hospital, said she “probably” has not treated anyone with postpartum psychosis. Goodheart also didn’t run any labs or use any type of standardized scale to determine the severity of Clancy’s postpartum depression. Providers didn’t do everything they could have for Clancy.
During the summer before graduate school, I began a search for a diagnosis that exhausted local world-renowned health care facilities in Philadelphia and a world-famous diagnostic facility a plane ride from my home.
“I can barely walk,” I’d admit. “My legs are weak and I can’t stand for more than a few minutes without having to sit.”
Often, I cried in the exam room with the doctor only a few feet away. Rather than recognizing my tears as a plea for help, I was usually told to seek out therapy.
“Go home and have a martini,” an orthopedic doctor told me when he learned I was newly 21.
With his hypothetical script for a cocktail, I moved onward to an infectious disease specialist, thinking perhaps I’d been bitten by a tick in the mountainous region of State College, Pennsylvania, where I had been living for the previous four years. “Leave my office and stop seeing doctors,” she shouted.
But throughout graduate school – and into my early years in the workforce – I continued seeing doctors. I researched my symptoms online, reading every research study connected to leg pain, global weakness, muscular twitching and nocturnal myoclonic jerks. If doctors wouldn’t do it for me, I would solve my case myself.
I suffered for more than a decade. Health care providers refused to listen.
On Day 9 of Clancy’s trial, when Dr. Goodheart was brought to the stand, I was angry to learn that lab work – specifically thyroid levels – were never ordered during Clancy’s postpartum period.
Postpartum thyroiditis – inflammation of the thyroid gland – occurs in about 5-10% of women within the first year after giving birth. Symptoms can include anxiety and weight loss followed by extreme tiredness and depression. Severe cases can trigger or mimic psychiatric symptoms, even those of psychosis. Clancy revealed these very symptoms to multiple health care providers, yet no one checked her thyroid function.
The diagnostic facility recommended an exercise program for me. They believed I was deconditioned and needed to rebuild my stamina. “But this came on overnight,” I reasoned. “Deconditioning happens over time.” My personal experience, no matter how loudly I pleaded, wasn’t heard.
I finished graduate school, married my husband and had our babies without knowing why weakness smothered me. I know what it’s like to be the parent at home, responsible for the lives of little humans; every meal, snack, outing and bath fell on me despite my body screaming that it simply could not physically manage it all.
At times, I’d cry alone in the bathroom, then push onward, a voice of reason hovering in my mind reminding me that this, too, shall pass.
But Clancy didn’t have that. Her voice of reason was overpowered by a stronger voice convincing her of the opposite, and no one successfully helped her through.
A neurologist asked me to show him a muscle fasciculation as proof that I was really experiencing these twitches. But they come on sporadically and cease with movement of that muscle; eliciting them isn’t realistic. Another neurologist told me, “You may never receive an answer.”
By that point, the weakness was so heavy I was barely able to get around my home. I was relying on a nanny to care for my children, climbing stairs from a sitting position, and I couldn’t walk into my son’s preschool at pickup.
Accepting the neurologist’s words meant giving up hope, but hope is what kept me going.
After more than a decade of struggling and searching and being told nothing was wrong, I found a neurologist who listened. “I think what we’re dealing with here is MS,” he said as he read the results of my lumbar puncture.
Despite a few small lesions on my brain MRI found in 2005, no one ordered a lumbar puncture – the follow-up test routinely used when a doctor is unsure about multiple sclerosis (MS) – until 2017.
Treatment has changed my life, restoring some of my strength and allowing me to return to many activities. But I was forced to survive more than a decade without a diagnosis or treatment because health care providers didn’t hear my cries for help.
Lindsay Clancy pleaded for help. It never came.
Clancy pleaded for help, too. She told Dr. Jennifer Tufts, her outpatient psychiatrist, “I’m having a really rough time.”
In an email, she wrote, “This has been going on for months now and I’m getting desperate for something that would work quickly to get me out of this depressed state.”
Tufts only saw Clancy virtually and had only been practicing independently for about a month before seeing her.
The trial revealed that when Clancy saw nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta, she wrote in a message to her, “I also just feel concerningly numb right now, like I have no emotion whatsoever. I feel like I’m going to die, and I don’t care. What do I do about this?”
Jollotta did not interpret Clancy’s words as a suicidal thought, did not advise her to go to the emergency room and instead simply provided her with a list of 24-hour emergency service programs.
Her overlapping medications were often increased despite a worsened mental state. In fact, Women and Infants Hospital wouldn’t accept Clancy into its postpartum program because medical providers there were concerned she may be overmedicated. They documented a follow-up call to nurse Jollotta but never received a response. Clancy didn’t get the help she deserved, but it wasn’t for her lack of trying.
There is no doubt that Clancy ultimately committed a horrific crime, one that may have been preventable with the right help. But like me, her cries for help were not enough. My story and hers are proof that women are not believed in the health care setting. And we cannot begin to truly help women until our words are seen as stronger than our providers’ perception of us.
Lindsay Karp is a writer and essayist with clips in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Cut and more. She writes often about her difficult diagnostic journey and is working on a memoir to highlight the barriers many women face in the health care setting. You can follow her on X: @KarpLindsay