There's no such thing as a postpartum chemical imbalance. Dr. Roger McFillin calls the theory "a complete lie," one he says has been pushed on the American public since the 1990s specifically to sell psychiatric drugs.

He points to Hardin's first law of human ecology: you are never intervening with just one thing. Since these drugs became standard prescriptions, we've seen an increase in all identifiable statistics around worsening mental health. That doesn't mean people aren't genuinely struggling.

Postpartum is a real and difficult period. Hormonal shifts, sleep deprivation, nutritional deficiencies, and a mountain of psychosocial pressure, marriage strain, inadequate support, economic demands pulling both parents back to work, all collide at once. Dr. McFillin says the message women get first is that something is wrong with them, when the truth is they're mothers overwhelmed trying to meet three children's needs without enough support.

That's what he says is playing out in the Lindsey Clancy case: pressure to return to work colliding with a culture that's lost a sense of what's normal, leaving women in battle with their own minds, carrying fear, guilt, and insecurity into a medical system that treats those feelings as symptoms of an underlying condition, then prescribes a drug with a poor efficacy and safety record.

@delbigtree