{"id":630894,"date":"2026-08-10T22:08:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T22:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/630894\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T22:08:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T22:08:15","slug":"lindsay-clancys-lawyer-takes-aim-at-her-psychiatrists-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/630894\/","title":{"rendered":"Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer takes aim at her psychiatrist’s care"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lindsay Clancy<\/a> \u2019s lawyer probed her psychiatrist\u2019s expertise, prescribing decisions and overall treatment as the defense sought Monday to suggest that the mental healthcare system mishandled the Massachusetts mother\u2019s decline in the months before she killed her three young children<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In questioning Dr. Jennifer Tufts<\/a>, defense lawyer Kevin Reddington spotlighted her use of 25-minute video appointments with limited time for talk therapy, the computerized forms that documented her observations, and the series of pharmaceuticals she recommended as Clancy reported various side effects, symptoms and concerns about taking medications. <\/p>\n

Reddington portrayed Clancy\u2019s care not as common practice in U.S. mental healthcare, but rather as inadequate and indifferent treatment of a deteriorating patient. At one point, Reddington implied that the doctor was a box-checking \u201crobot.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat did you do? You had a woman who was telling you she felt hopeless,\u201d he asked as they discussed an appointment about two months before the killings.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told her that this was something we could address, that there was hope, that there are treatments, that there are different types of programs,\u201d Tufts said, \u201cso she knew that she still had options and a reason to hope.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDid you ever suggest to her that \u2018maybe you should come in and see me, rather than on the computer?\u2019\u201d Reddington asked. <\/p>\n

\u201cTalking to her over the video didn\u2019t seem like an issue. It didn\u2019t seem like there was something I was missing,\u201d Tufts replied. <\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

EDITOR\u2019S 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.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Clancy\u2019s camp says she tried everything to get help <\/p>\n

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\u2019s home<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

Prosecutors argue that the former labor and delivery nurse was an intentional killer who connived to get her husband out of the house<\/a>, then strangled the children with exercise bands on Jan. 24, 2023. Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham has urged jurors not to view the trial as \u201ca public debate about women\u2019s mental health and how the medical system treats women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clancy\u2019s attorneys don\u2019t dispute that she killed the children. But they say she shouldn\u2019t be held criminally responsible because she was mentally ill, believing that she heard voices ordering her to take the children\u2019s lives and her own. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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The defense contends that she was in the grip of bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis<\/a>, a rare postpregnancy condition that can alter women\u2019s sense of reality. A forensic psychiatrist diagnosed her with those conditions after the killings. <\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Psychiatrist says Clancy never indicated she\u2019d harm her kids<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Clancy at times said she was \u201cclose\u201d 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 \u2014 as the defense says she did to her husband \u2014 that she had thoughts about harming the children.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would have been very concerned if I had heard that,\u201d Tufts said. <\/p>\n

Clancy is suing Tufts and other practitioners in civil court. <\/p>\n

\u201cI do not believe that I\u2019ve been negligent,\u201d 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\u2019s first appointment. <\/p>\n

Nurse-practitioner testifies about treating Clancy<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Paul testified that Clancy came to her with concerns about medications she\u2019d 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\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

Reddington will have his chance to question Paul on Tuesday. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lindsay Clancy \u2019s lawyer probed her psychiatrist\u2019s expertise, prescribing decisions and overall treatment as the defense sought Monday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[276],"tags":[5546,27,18,3334,135,11588,10159,19,146788,17,266537,261803,4076,147731,20513,462,167,502,95994,20093,7001,55020,4077,23951],"class_list":["post-630894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-bipolar-disorder","tag-courts","tag-eire","tag-general-news","tag-health","tag-health-care-industry","tag-homicide","tag-ie","tag-indictments","tag-ireland","tag-jennifer-tufts","tag-kevin-reddington","tag-legal-proceedings","tag-lindsay-clancy","tag-massachusetts","tag-medication","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-pregnancy-and-childbirth","tag-rhode-island","tag-suicide","tag-trials","tag-u-s-news","tag-violence"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}