LONDON — Sofii Lewis knew something was deeply wrong within days of giving birth to her first child, Evie, in January 2023.
“I just didn’t have a bond with my daughter,” Lewis said. “I didn’t really want to be around her.”
Then the part-time baker became convinced that she or someone else might harm Evie. At night, a beeping sound — like that of a checkout till — haunted Lewis. She began to fear that someone was going to “buy Evie,” and she became “very suicidal,” said Lewis, who is now 27.
She also began to have thoughts of taking Evie’s life, in addition to her own.
“I know I certainly was hours, days away,” said Lewis, who lives in Aberdare, Wales.
Lewis believes that had she not received treatment within the U.K.’s trailblazing maternal mental healthcare system after being diagnosed with “tendencies of postpartum psychosis,” both she and Evie might not be alive today.
Lewis and other mothers she knows who have experienced maternal mental health struggles have been closely watching the case of Lindsay Clancy, who has been on trial for killing her three children after she strangled them in their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home in January 2023. Clancy’s defense team has argued that she should not be held criminally responsible for her actions because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time.
“A lot of other mums I’m in contact with who had postpartum psychosis also find it very, very triggering,” Lewis, whose daughter was born the same month that Clancy killed her three children, said of the case. “Because that could have been any one of us who did that.”
It was receiving months of care at a Mother and Baby Unit that Lewis says may have saved both her and Evie’s lives. MBUs are specialist, inpatient units that treat women suffering from mental health issues during pregnancy and after the birth of their children in the U.K. That the service allows mothers to remain with their babies as they receive care instead of being separated deserves to be emulated elsewhere, experts and mothers say.
“I strongly believe if she’d been in the U.K., she would have been admitted to a Mother and Baby Unit and all three of her kids would still be alive today — and she would be absolutely fine,” Lewis said of Clancy.
Dr. Veerle Bergink, a psychiatrist, said she agreed that Clancy’s case might have ended differently had she been treated at one of the U.K.’s National Health Service MBUs.
“Lindsay Clancy had a severe postpartum mental illness,” said Bergink, who is the director of Mount Sinai’s Women’s Mental Health Center in New York. “And she did not get the right treatment.”
The U.K., she said, is considered by many in the field as “the cradle” of modern maternal mental healthcare.” Meanwhile, the U.S. “is behind in knowledge about perinatal psychiatry,” with limited options for treatment for serious conditions like postpartum psychosis in America’s fragmented healthcare system, she said.
According to Bergink, Britain’s MBU approach is “without a doubt” the best way to treat postpartum psychosis.
According to the National Health Service, or NHS, up to 26% of new and expectant mothers experience perinatal mental health illness, which covers a wide range of conditions. In 2025 alone, it says on its website that more than 66,000 women accessed specialist community-based care and support for perinatal mental health issues.
