Lindsay Clancy’s ‘worst day’ revealed weeks before she killed her 3 kids: ‘Persistent and intrusive thoughts of suicide’
Lindsay Clancy’s “worst day” was revealed in court Tuesday with jurors learning she was plagued with “persistent and intrusive thoughts of suicide” — but denied entry into an outpatient program over fears she was “overmedicated,” her lawyer alleged.
The 35-year-old Massachusetts mother of three called a nurse practitioner on Dec. 15, 2022, with her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, to report she was having such dark thoughts and they would likely go to the emergency department of Mass General Hospital. Just a month later, she would go on to kill her kids before attempting to kill herself.
Nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta – who works at South Shore Hospital’s Perinatal Behavioral Clinic – said the pair told her “this has been the worst day for Lindsay.”
She was having “persistent and intrusive thoughts of suicide” but she had “no active plan” to harm herself, Jolllota said, reading from her notes about the phone call.
The Clancys told Jollotta they would “likely go to MGH” but that Clancy was also considering checking herself into mental institution McLean Hospital, Jollotta told the jury.
Clancy did go to the emergency room that day and ended up opting out of checking into McLean, deciding instead that she would join an outpatient program at Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island, Jollotta said.
The nurse practitioner had “strongly, strongly” recommended that Clancy check into Women and Infants in a Dec. 12, 2022 MyChart message to the struggling postpartum mom – who’d given birth to her 8-month-old son, Callan, in May 2022, the jury learned.
Ironically, when Clancy went to Women and Infants on Dec. 20, 2022, they turned her away because they thought she might have been taking too many prescription medications, according to Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington.
“Did you know that, in fact, they wouldn’t accept her because of their concern she had been overmedicated on drugs?” Reddington said to Jollotta during cross-examination.
“I can’t speak to that,” the nurse practitioner responded, noting she wasn’t affiliated with the other hospital.
Women and Infants recommended that Clancy enter a general mental health facility like McLean, rather than the hospital that specialized in postpartum, Clancy told Jollotta over MyCharts the next day on Dec. 21, 2022.
Jollotta previously met with Clancy and Patrick in person during a Dec. 6, 2022, visit and raised the possibility that Clancy could have bipolar disorder, she testified.
“I recall Patrick saying, ‘My wife is not bipolar,’” Jollotta said.
The nurse practitioner said she suspected the disorder because Clancy had such strong reactions to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Zoloft and Prozac – a common side effect for people with bipolar disorder.
Clancy told Jollotta that when she previously took Zoloft, “I didn’t sleep for 48 hours and I wasn’t tired,” Jollotta said.
The lack of sleep with no fatigue could be a symptom of a manic episode, Jollotta said.
The nurse practitioner said she thought Clancy’s contradictory symptoms suggested she might be in a “mixed manic, hypomanic state.”
On the one hand, Clancy had racing thoughts and couldn’t sleep and on the other, she was depressed and felt numb, the nurse practitioner explained to the jury.
Still, Jollotta – who has treated five women with postpartum psychosis and hundreds of other women with postpartum depression and anxiety – never had concerns Clancy was in psychosis, she testified.
She explained that she only worked with Clancy from Nov. 29, 2022, through Dec. 13, 2022. During that time, Jollotta prescribed her a slew of powerful psychiatric medications.
Clancy was also being prescribed medications by her shrink, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, and she’d been given more meds during an eventual stint at McLean that began on New Year’s Day 2023, weeks before the killings.
She stayed in the facility for five days before asking to leave to attend the birthday of her oldest child, Cora, 5.
Before jurors were brought in for the 11th day of trial Tuesday, Reddington asked Judge William Sullivan if he could call a therapist who previously worked at McLean to testify after she made a TikTok video saying she couldn’t stand for the “lies” that had come out at trial about the mental institution.
The therapist, Emily Thorndike, left McLean a year prior to Clancy’s stay there but claimed she still had friends who worked there at the time and knew the hospital was understaffed on the holidays.
Thorndike, “is available, ready, willing and able to testify about an employees’ opinion as to what a woeful environment McLean offers, especially on holidays … nobody was there,” Reddington said.
The defense attorney said after testimony from a psychiatrist who treated Clancy at McLean jurors “are left with the impression that McLean was this wonderful place and [Clancy] didn’t have any interest in utilizing what was available to her.”
Clancy allegedly murdered Cora, Dawson, 3, and Callan with exercise bands before she slit her wrists and throat and threw herself from the second story of her house. She was partially paralyzed in the fall and is now wheelchair bound.
Reddington is asking a jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity on the grounds she was misdiagnosed and overmedicated.
Clancy and Patrick — who has since remarried — have both filed medical malpractice lawsuits against her providers for the same reason.
SOURCE: NYPOST