Women Who Don’t Know Women: Lindsay Clancy’s Prescribers

     Dr. Jennifer Tufts was the first of two psychiatrists and another two psychiatric nurse practitioners who prescribed Lindsay Clancy at least eleven different psychiatric medications over sixteen weeks for “post partum psychosis.” All were women. In January, 2023, at the end of that four month period, Clancy murdered her three young children and tried to take her own life.

     The defense at her current murder trial will claim that Clancy should be acquitted because she was made insane by the involuntary intoxication of so many conflicting psychotropic medications given to her in such a short amount of time by those prescribing staff at Aster Mental Health, just outside Boston.

     How could those four prescribing women be so that far removed from the reality of Clancy’s true condition and be so trigger happy with their prescription pads, even when Clancy herself said she was doing worse after taking some of these medications? You would think a woman would be more, not less, in tune with the struggles of another woman after she had given birth.

     Was it because the newly posted Tufts only met with Clancy via telehealth sessions and was therefore protected from experiencing first hand, face to face, the difficulty Lindsay was having in life and could therefore so easily just write a prescription? Was it because these four women were too indoctrinated by their training in the theoretical world of psychiatry which dictates the prescription of this SSRI or that benzo for some questionable diagnosis and the idea that those risky medications will solve everything?

     Remarkably, after Lindsay was sent to the Women and Infants Hospital in nearby Providence for further evaluation when she was not improving under the treatment of the Aster women, she was told she had been overmedicated. The Rhode Island facility that specializes in obstetrics, gynecology, and newborn pediatrics declared after eight hours of in-person interviews and testing that Lindsay was overmedicated and that her “post partum psychosis” symptoms were mostly the result of the crazy cocktail of drugs she had been on.

     This is a hospital run by women for women, and regardless of their academic or medical training, they were working in the real world, day in and day out, helping other women who might have difficulties before, during, or after giving birth.

     That’s a different culture altogether than Aster Mental Health, which is a psychiatric, not a medical facility. Both facilities have women practitioners, but apparently the natural human care and the “Do no harm” medical expertise had long ago been trained out of these psychiatric practitioners at Aster.