Crime
“I recall Patrick [Clancy] saying, ‘My wife is not bipolar,’” psychiatric nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta said Tuesday. “Lindsay looked at me; she did not say anything.”
Livestream via NBC 10 WJAR.
On the stand: Latiesha Dukes, licensed mental health counselor, former perinatal clinician at South Shore Hospital
Previously:
- Sgt. Daniel Lawlor, Massachusetts State Police
This story may contain content readers find disturbing. For help with postpartum mood disorders, text or call 1-833-TLC-MAMA for the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call 988 or go to https://988lifeline.org/ to chat online.
Testimony continues Wednesday in Lindsay Clancy‘s murder trial after jurors heard from two psychiatric nurse practitioners who treated her at South Shore Hospital’s Perinatal Behavioral Health Program.
Julie Paul, Clancy’s original provider within the program, received praise from defense attorney Kevin Reddington, who said Paul “stepped up” and treated Clancy “with good care and professionalism, in my opinion.”
By contrast, Rebecca Jollotta — who treated Clancy after Paul left South Shore Hospital — faced heavy cross-examination over Clancy’s prescription history and potential signs of bipolar disorder in the months before she killed her children.
Clancy, now 36, is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan. She doesn’t deny that she strangled all three children at home in Duxbury on Jan. 24, 2023, but she’s raising what’s known as an insanity defense as she argues she was wracked by postpartum mental illness and heard a voice in her head instructing her to kill.
Prosecutors, on the other hand, allege Clancy had grown tired of her life as a mother and “deliberately and meticulously” killed her children before severely injuring herself in a suicide attempt.
While Clancy has since been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Jollotta testified Tuesday that she faced some pushback after raising the possible diagnosis with Clancy and her then-husband, Patrick, in December 2022.
“I recall Patrick saying, ‘My wife is not bipolar,’” Jollotta told jurors. “Lindsay looked at me; she did not say anything.”
She pointed to Clancy’s difficulty tolerating certain antidepressants and reports of insomnia without tiredness as potential red flags for bipolar disorder, though Jollotta also said the symptoms reported to her at the time didn’t fully meet the diagnostic criteria.
Jollotta told jurors Clancy attributed “a lot of her symptoms to her medication” and tended to take medications for shorter periods of time than prescribed before reporting adverse effects. Clancy also worried she was growing dependent on the benzodiazepines she had been prescribed, though Jollotta said she wasn’t as concerned.
“I feel addicted to it, and I feel like I’m not being heard that that is a possibility,” Clancy allegedly wrote in one message to Jollotta. “I feel like we are throwing all these different meds at my insomnia when the root cause is Ativan dependence. I don’t feel any of the anxious thoughts I had before. I feel completely numb.”
According to Jollotta, Clancy also reported “horrible intrusive thoughts” in early December of 2022, which she described as “thoughts of not wanting to be here.”
Still, Jollotta denied that Clancy ever told her she was hearing voices or indicated that she had a plan to kill herself or harm her children.
She testified that she repeatedly recommended Clancy engage with a partial hospitalization program at the Women & Infants Hospital Center for Women’s Behavioral Health in Rhode Island. Clancy did so on Dec. 20, 2022, but was discharged “because of their concern that she had been overmedicated by drugs,” Reddington noted.
He further alleged that the hospital diagnosed Clancy with depression “due to adverse drug effects.”
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Abby Patkin
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