A mother told her nurse she was having intrusive thoughts she’d never had before. The nurse said that’s common. A mother told a crisis hotline she felt like she was going to die and didn’t care. The hotline said she didn’t qualify for help. A psychiatrist prescribed her a drug cocktail without ever meeting her face to face. A hospital flagged her as overmedicated but couldn’t be bothered to call her nurse back.
Three children are dead. And the only person in a courtroom is the mother in the wheelchair.
Funny how that works.
Lindsay Clancy, 36, is on trial in Plymouth County Superior Court for the murders of her three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, at the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023. She strangled them with exercise bands and then tried to kill herself. The attempt failed but left her paralyzed for life. She has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, citing postpartum psychosis, and she is suing her former healthcare providers for malpractice and negligence.
Ask yourself who benefits from putting all of this on her.
The testimony this week laid the system’s failures bare. Nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta told the court that on December 1, 2022, Clancy messaged her saying she could no longer take the antidepressant Remeron because she was having “very intrusive thoughts that I never had before.” The next day, Clancy wrote: “I feel concerningly numb right now, like I have no emotion whatsoever. I feel like I’m going to die and I don’t care. What do I do about this?”
Jollotta’s response was to tell her intrusive thoughts are “common” in postpartum depression and ask if she’d been taking Seroquel. She testified she believed Clancy was experiencing depression, not medication side effects. A woman is screaming that she feels nothing and might die, and the expert’s move is to ask about another pill.
Then Clancy called a crisis hotline. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington said a clinician from Aspire Crisis Support met with her virtually and told her she didn’t meet criteria for inpatient treatment because she had no specific suicide plan. Reddington’s paraphrase of the message: “You’re not laying on the ground with your throat cut, so we’re not going to be able to help you.”
That’s the bar. You have to already be dying before the people whose entire job is preventing that outcome will lift a finger.
Dr. Jennifer Tufts, the psychiatrist who prescribed Clancy a “barrage of drugs,” never met her in person. She’s now a key figure in the trial, and by all accounts her testimony was marked by a “frustrated, impolite demeanor” toward the defense lawyer and “bumbling answers” on the stand. A doctor who prescribed powerful psychiatric medication to a struggling mother without once sitting in the same room with her, and she’s the one acting put upon.
And here is the detail that should make every person in this country furious. Jollotta referred Clancy to the Women and Infants Hospital postpartum program in Rhode Island. Reddington says the hospital rejected Clancy because of concerns she had been overmedicated. The hospital wrote that it contacted Jollotta for information about Clancy’s medications. Jollotta testified she never received that call. “I never received a call from Women and Infants,” she said, adding she “absolutely would have called them back.”
So a hospital identified a patient as overmedicated, flagged it, and then the communication just vanished into thin air. Nobody followed up. Nobody escalated. Nobody did anything. Seven weeks later, three children were dead.
The establishment closes ranks. The nurse says she gave Clancy “access to resources.” The crisis hotline says she didn’t meet criteria. The hospital says it made a call. The psychiatrist says she did her job. Every single one of them has a paperwork excuse, and every single excuse leads to the same place: a paralyzed woman in a wheelchair and three children who will never grow up.
The experts had every chance to stop this. They didn’t. And now they want you to believe the only person who belongs on trial is the one they failed.