What Simple Test Lindsay Clancy's Doctors Never Ran

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today. This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:21)
Patrick Clancy's civil suit against Lindsay Clancy's providers is what we are talking about today.
Not the criminal case that's going on. We are certainly covering that as well, but what about that civil case? What's going on there and what's in there? What's in that suit? It's very interesting. We're going to break it down and I'd love to get your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube as we do exactly that. January 23rd of 2023, Lindsay Clancy sat down for a scheduled appointment with her mental health provider. The appointment lasted 17 minutes. That number comes from a lawsuit her ex-husband filed. And according to that filing, it wasn't unusual. Her appointments that month all ran about 17 minutes. The next day, her three children were dead. Cora was five, Dawson was three, Callan was eight months. Patrick Clancy is their father. And in January 26, almost three years after he buried his kids, his lawyers filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Norfolk Superior Court. Lindsay Clancy isn't named as a defendant. Most people who treated her are. He filed on behalf of himself and the estates of his three children. An estate is the legal stand-in for someone who died. That makes Cora, Dawson and Callan plaintiffs in their father's case. What sits inside that filing is a four-month record of a woman asking for help and a detailed accusation about what happened when she asked. Somebody wants to compare this to Chris Watts. And insert other case here. And there may be some that do have legitimate comparable angles.
But comparing it to some of these is utterly insane. We'll make another video about that.
But here's what happened here. Here's the details of this case before you just go, well, what about that one over there? Well, that's not this one. And here is this one. And here's why. Wrongful death works like this. A family member sues and claims that negligence caused a death. And negligence means care that fell below what a reasonable professional would deliver. A civil jury decides whether that claim is more likely true than not. Nobody goes to prison because a civil case is about responsibility and money. That standard is a lower bar than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which prosecutors have to clear in a criminal courtroom. The difference matters because two cases about the same three children are moving through two different counties and one of them will finish first. Patrick suit names two providers and their employers. Dr. Jennifer Tufts is a psychiatrist at Astor Mental Health, and Lindsay first contacted her in September of 2022 Rebecca Jolotta is a psychiatrist nurse or psychiatric nurse practitioner at South Shore Health System, and she started treating Lindsay that November. Lindsay worked as a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. Callan, her youngest, was born in May of 22, and according to the filings, she spent roughly four months seeking psychiatric care before her children died. The complaints language about the prescriptions is blunt. It says the providers misprescribed a bevy of diverse and powerful medications and added new drugs in an ad hoc manner. Ad hoc means without a plan. One drug isn't working, so another gets added and then another. Not exactly something anyone should be doing with prescription drugs ever.
And they know it.
The exact count depends on the filing. The civil lawsuits say Lindsay was prescribed nine psychiatric medications in the months before the killings, including eight inside a three-week stretch of the criminal defense team, puts the number at 13 The lawsuit also is describing what Lindsay was telling her providers while the prescriptions changed. She said repeatedly that she believed the medications themselves were causing her symptoms. Those symptoms included worsening insomnia, depression and thoughts of ending it. The warnings came from the patient herself directly. And more than once, according to the filings, her own complaint lays out what she did as she got sicker. She went to the emergency rooms called Crisis Outlines, admitted herself to hospitals. She took the medication she was prescribed and kept reporting her worsening symptoms. Patrick's complaint is specific about what should have happened next. It says the provider should have run tests to learn why Lindsay reacted badly to drugs like Zoloft and Prozac. Lab work would have shown whether her body was metabolizing the drugs, meaning breaking them down instead of letting them build up. The complaint states no lab work was done. And in mid-December of 22, Lindsay was admitted to a partial day program at Women and Infants Hospital in Rhode Island. A partial day program means a patient gets treatment during the day and sleeps at home. According to her suit, a psychiatrist there concluded she had no postpartum depression and ruled out bipolar disorder because there was no family history. Notes in her own file showed her sister had postpartum anxiety. At the end of December, she entered a program at McLean Hospital for Patients with postpartum depression. She reported feeling detached and hopeless, according to her filings. Her suit says the program was staffed by a skeleton crew over the New Year's holiday, and it calls the care she received there grossly inadequate. After she was discharged, the lawsuit says her providers noted her poor mental state. The filings allege that adequate follow up still never happened. And in January 23, she was back with Dr. Tufts. The suit says Tufts' own documentation described Lindsay's condition as deteriorating. A word that came out of the provider's file and not a lawyer's argument.