Alyssa Milano republished a personal essay about her postpartum anxiety and psychiatric hospitalization this week, saying the ongoing Lindsay Clancy murder trial prompted her to share it again.
Milano posted the piece on her Substack. The essay was first written for Time in 2018. She noted at the top that her experience and Clancy's are different but said the trial made it feel important to revisit the subject. "Postpartum anxiety and postpartum psychosis are different conditions, and my experience is not Lindsay Clancy's," she wrote. "But the trial has brought renewed attention to a truth that connects them: maternal mental-health symptoms must be recognized, believed and treated with urgency."
The essay details the period following the birth of Milano's son Milo in 2011. She had planned for a natural birth but required a C-section ten days before her due date due to complications. The anxiety began almost immediately after she and Milo came home.
"That first night, after we returned from the hospital, I suffered my first anxiety attack," Milano wrote. "I felt like I had already disappointed my child. I felt like I failed as a mother, since I was not able to give birth vaginally or nourish him with the breast milk that had not come in yet. My heart raced. My stomach seized up. I felt like I was dying."
She described a period of stability that collapsed when her son got sick just before she was scheduled to return to work. The daily anxiety became severe. "Every day, I would drive to work and think about all the ways that Milo could die in the hands of his caretakers," she wrote. "Every night, after working 16-hour days, after I was finally able to hold my child and put him to sleep, my day's anxiety would culminate into a debilitating anxiety attack."
The crisis eventually brought her to an emergency room at 2 a.m. "Finally, I hit a wall. One early morning, I went to the emergency room at 2:00 AM, asked for a psychiatrist and got help. I felt as though I had no choice: I asked to be committed; I stayed in a public psychiatric ward for three days," she wrote.
Milano also addressed the uneven access to mental health care that many mothers face. "Here's the thing about mental illnesses: you don't always look sick, and the answers are not always clear or black-and-white," she wrote. "But we should not confront these challenges by placing more hurdles in front of Americans who desperately need the care. I was lucky enough to have the means and the insurance to get the help and support I needed. What happens to those mothers who don't have the kind of support I received?"
Clancy is currently on trial for the 2023 killings of her three young children. She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Her defense team has argued she was experiencing postpartum psychosis at the time of the murders.
