They Sent Her Home Five Times: Aaisha Alvi on Postpartum Psychosis and the Lindsay Clancy Case
This episode was recorded on August 30, 2026, the day the jury was still deliberating in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Clancy is the Massachusetts mother whose defense argues she was experiencing postpartum psychosis when she killed her three young children in 2023. That case is the backdrop for this conversation. Aaisha Alvi's story is very similar to Clancy’s except in her case, after many attempts to get help, a psychiatrists finally heard her desperate pleas.
Aaisha is a postpartum psychosis survivor, awareness advocate, and author of A Mom Like That: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis. She experienced postpartum psychosis twice: once after the birth of her daughter, and once after a miscarriage at fourteen weeks. Both times she sought help. Both times, repeatedly, she was dismissed. Both of these occurrences are not included in the statistics gathered to determine the prevalence of PPP.
The first episode resolved on its own after four months, during which Aaisha believed her family intended to harm her daughter, that her daughter was an adult pretending to be a baby, and that her husband had plans to abuse the child. She was taken to the doctor twice during this time and sent home both times with no screening and no diagnosis. She only understood what had happened to her years later, after writing her book.
The second episode was worse. She returned to her doctor five times as her symptoms escalated from depression through intrusive thoughts to command hallucinations directing her to harm strangers on the street and to throw herself into traffic. She told doctors she was hearing voices. She told them she was being compelled to do evil things. She asked to be hospitalized. She was sent home each time, told she was grieving, told she appeared to be coping well, told she was having a panic attack. It was only when a perinatal psychiatrist spent ninety minutes with her, took a full case history, and involved her husband that she was finally recognized as psychotic and given the right medication. She stabilized within a week and a half.
The conversation covers the full picture: what postpartum psychosis actually is, how it differs from postpartum depression, why the hallucinations and delusions feel completely real to the person experiencing them, why calling it rare is inaccurate and dangerous, why being disturbed by your thoughts does not mean you are safe, and what the Lindsay Clancy case reveals about how thoroughly the medical system fails women in psychotic crisis. Aaisha is precise, generous, and unflinching. This is essential listening for anyone who has given birth, loves someone who has, or works anywhere near perinatal care.
Find Aaisha at @AaishaAlviWrites on social media and her memoir A Mom Like That at most book retailers and libraries.
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