Why Lindsay Clancy Spent One Day at the Only Program Built for Her

**Tony Brueski** (0:11)
It's number six of 2022 Rebecca Jollotta, a psychiatric nurse practitioner at South Shore Health sits across from Lindsay Clancy and her husband Patrick in an exam room. It's one of the few in-person appointments Clancy had with any provider in the final months before the killings. Jollotta tells them she suspects Lindsay has an underlying bipolar disorder. After taking Zoloft weeks earlier, Lindsay went 48 hours without sleeping. She wasn't tired despite the insomnia. She had racing thoughts and couldn't stop worrying. Jollotta testified she found the reaction to Zoloft unusual, which is a red flag for bipolar. Patrick Clancy's response in that room. My wife is not bipolar.
People don't react.
They are. People are going to think they know better than the doctors. You know, and it's funny, because in the world we live in today, sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. And sometimes getting the information like that thrown at you, the initial reaction, if you don't quite understand what bipolar actually is, which most of us really don't, is just that. Because in our minds, when we hear something like bipolar, or psychosis, or psychotic, which are two different things, we have an almost cartoon version of it in our minds, or movie-like version of it in our minds, where it's the greatest hits of these disorders, of these ailments, where I couldn't possibly be that. You know, it's an example is like thinking of the alcoholic, of, well, the alcoholic sitting under the bridge with the paper bag. Now, the alcoholic is sitting down in the boardroom, running the company, possibly into the ground, or it's succeeding wonderfully and nobody has any idea that anything's wrong.
Things like this, more times than not, are not the way we picture them in our mind's eye. And that's because we're human. I don't fault Patrick Clancy for having that reaction. I don't fault Lindsay Clancy for sitting there motionless.
Emotionless, numb to pretty much anything that's going on around her, as she's even said.
Lindsay looked at Jollotta, she didn't say anything. Lindsay Clancy had, or has, since been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, so the doctor was on to something. On day 11 of her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court, the nurse practitioner who first raised that possibility told the jury what she saw and what she recommended. One provider identified a diagnosis, the defense is put before the jury six weeks before the children died. Jollotta inherited Clancy's care on November 29th of 2022 Julie Paul, who started the perinatal behavioral health program, went to South Shore and treated Clancy for nine days, transferred out. Paul was the prosecution's 61st witness. Her cross-examination lasted about a minute. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington told Paul she stepped up and treated Clancy with good care and professionalism. He thanked her in open court, then Jollotta took the stand and stayed there most of the day. Jollotta is a board certified psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. In the same program that Paul built, she's named as a defendant in Clancy's family medical malpractice lawsuit. Her job after the handoff was to manage medications and monitor symptoms. Jollotta testified it was common practice to pair low dosages of multiple medications together to treat depression, anxiety and sleep at the same time. Clancy messaged Jollotta constantly through the MyChart patient portal from late November through late December of 2022 Quote, sorry for all the messages. This is just a scary time for me, she wrote in one message. I'm willing to try anything, she wrote in another. In a third, she said she felt numb. On December 3rd, Clancy wrote she was having horrible intrusive thoughts. Jollotta testified those thoughts had to do with not wanting to be here anymore. Clancy also wrote she felt completely hopeless. Before Jollotta took over, Clancy had already cycled through four medications between October and mid-November of 22 The South Shore Emergency Room visit added Tracidone to the mix. Reddington walked Jollotta through each prescription to establish the timeline. In one message, Clancy wrote she was scared of starting medications. After four days on the regimen Jollotta prescribed, she told Jollotta it wasn't working. Jollotta encouraged her to give it more time. Within days, Clancy wanted dosage changes and different prescriptions.
And this is where a lot of people who have never been in that situation, because if you were, you would understand this very differently, like to argue, see, she was shopping for meds. She wanted to get high.

**SPEAKER_1** (6:09)
She wanted to get effed up.

**Tony Brueski** (6:11)
No, no, she was wanting to be sane. She was wanting to get a decent night's sleep. She was wanting not to live in numbness and brain fog every moment of her life. She wanted to enjoy her children. She wanted to be a connected mother to her little baby, whom she had just given birth to, and was confused as hell as to why it was impossible for her to seemingly emotionally connect with him. She wanted to, but there was nothing there to do it with. And if you've never had that feeling, that feeling of hopelessness, of emptiness, of utter numbness to what should be in front of you, or what is in front of you, that you know you should be having this emotional, visceral response to, and for some reason, your effect to it, your emotional effect to it is, eh, consider yourself lucky. Consider yourself lucky that you've never been there.