In a tense courtroom exchange Monday, the defense attorney for Lindsay Clancy interrogated her psychiatrist, challenging the adequacy and precision of the mental health care she received. The investigation aimed to cast doubt on the mental health system’s handling of the Massachusetts mother’s condition in the critical months prior to the tragic deaths of her three young children.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington honed in on Dr. Jennifer Tufts’ reliance on brief, 25-minute virtual consultations, which left little time for substantial talk therapy. Furthermore, Reddington scrutinized the efficiency of her form-filling practices and the assortment of medications she prescribed, despite Clancy expressing side effects and apprehension regarding pharmaceutical treatments.
Reddington painted a picture of Clancy’s mental healthcare as insufficient and mechanized, diverging from what is typically expected within U.S. mental health services. At one juncture, Reddington insinuated that Tufts operated like a checklist-driven “robot,” lacking genuine concern for her patient’s worsening state.
He directly questioned the psychiatrist’s actions, asking, “What did you do? You had a woman who was telling you she felt hopeless,” referring to an appointment approximately two months before the fatal incident.
In response, Dr. Tufts maintained, “I told her that this was something we could address, that there was hope, that there are treatments, that there are different types of programs,” assuring that Clancy knew there were still paths forward and reasons to remain hopeful.
“Did you ever suggest to her that ‘maybe you should come in and see me, rather than on the computer?’” Reddington asked.
“Talking to her over the video didn’t seem like an issue. It didn’t seem like there was something I was missing,” Tufts replied.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
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Clancy’s camp says she tried everything to get help
Clancy, 35, has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged from 8 months to 5 years old. They were found in the basement of the family’s home in coastal Duxbury, Massachusetts, where their mother was lying in the yard. She had jumped out a second-story window and remains paralyzed from the waist down.
Prosecutors argue that the former labor and delivery nurse was an intentional killer who connived to get her husband out of the house, then strangled the children with exercise bands on Jan. 24, 2023. Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham has urged jurors not to view the trial as “a public debate about women’s mental health and how the medical system treats women.”
Clancy’s attorneys don’t dispute that she killed the children. But they say she shouldn’t be held criminally responsible because she was mentally ill, believing that she heard voices ordering her to take the children’s lives and her own.
The defense contends that she was in the grip of bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis, a rare postpregnancy condition that can alter women’s sense of reality. A forensic psychiatrist diagnosed her with those conditions after the killings.
Her attorneys say Clancy did everything she could to seek help: She turned to multiple outpatient providers, tried various drugs they prescribed, called a suicide hotline, went to an emergency room, and approached but wasn’t accepted into a hospital-based, full-day treatment program for women with postpregnancy mental health problems. Clancy then even checked herself into a psychiatric hospital for several days.
Rather than improving, her condition worsened on the ever-remixed cocktail of psychiatric medications, some of them problematic for bipolar patients, her attorneys and family say. Tufts noted that it can be difficult to tell whether such conditions as depression are continuing because of a medicine or despite it.
Psychiatrist says Clancy never indicated she’d harm her kids
Tufts saw Clancy, via video, from September 2022 until the day before the killings. Her diagnosis: generalized anxiety disorder and an adjustment disorder with depressed mood.
The psychiatrist testified that Clancy never told her about manic episodes, a criterion for bipolar diagnoses, nor about hearing voices or having other signs of psychosis.
Clancy at times said she was “close” to feeling suicidal, hopeless or like she was going to die, Tufts recalled. But she said Clancy denied having a plan to take her own life or harm anyone else and never revealed — as the defense says she did to her husband — that she had thoughts about harming the children.
“I would have been very concerned if I had heard that,” Tufts said.
Clancy is suing Tufts and other practitioners in civil court.
“I do not believe that I’ve been negligent,” Tufts testified in the criminal trial Monday as Reddington questioned how much experience she had treating postpregnancy conditions before Clancy came to her. Tufts finished her psychiatric residency training in July 2022 and joined a private practice the month before Clancy’s first appointment.
Nurse-practitioner testifies about treating Clancy
As Tufts left court after two days of testimony, Clancy sat still in her wheelchair with her knitted hands to her face, looking downward at the defense table.
Prosecutors went on to question psychiatric nurse-practitioner and nurse midwife Julie Paul, a pregnancy and postpregnancy specialist whom Clancy consulted briefly in November 2022. Their interactions spanned about 10 days, as Paul was leaving for another job.
Paul testified that Clancy came to her with concerns about medications she’d been using for sleep, and that led to a few reshufflings as Clancy continued reporting various symptoms and seeking new solutions by the day. Trial-and-error switching isn’t unusual in psychiatry, said Paul, who also said Clancy never told her of any thoughts of harming herself or her children or having any hallucinations.
Reddington will have his chance to question Paul on Tuesday.
If convicted of murder, Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.