Psychologist & Rebuttal Witness Testifies Lindsay Clancy Has 'Bipolar 2' — Kirk Heilbrun Part 1

Kirk Heilbrun is a forensic psychologist at Drexel University who worked at Florida State Hospital and Central State Hospital. He evaluated Lindsay Clancy by analyzing her medical records and digital forensics such as her Apple Watch data. He also interviewed Clancy, her former husband Patrick Clancy, and her mother-in-law, Sue Clancy. His evaluation focused on whether she meets the Massachusetts standard for criminal responsibility: suffering from a mental disease or defect that caused her to lack substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or conform her behavior to the law. Heilbrun diagnosed her with Bipolar II Disorder based on her history of depressive episodes and her response to mood-stabilizing medications while hospitalized after she killed her three children on Jan. 24, 2023. He said that while she exhibited some high-energy periods, they did not meet the full criteria for a manic episode required for a Bipolar I diagnosis. He testified as a rebuttal witness for prosecutors on Monday (August 24, day 19). Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague questioned him in direct-exam. 06:43 " in your experience in doing forensic evaluations and in teaching people how to do forensic evaluations, would you call someone you're doing a forensic evaluation on your patient?" "No, I would call them perhaps someone who's being evaluated or an evaluee or something like that." 14:31 "I served as the chair of my department at Drexel for 15 years, and I've also served as the president of two national organizations, the two that are most strongly associated with forensic psychology in this country-one is the American Psychology Law Society, and the other is the American Board of Forensic Psychology." 18:29 "About 10 1/2 hours was spent in meeting with Miss Clancy and doing the testing, and then another hour and a half was spent in collateral interviews." 22:01 "And if you could tell us what were your major findings regarding Ms. Clancy's mental health history before September of 2022?" "She had a fairly limited mental health history before September 2022. This was she did experience some anxiety related to achievement. She's a very strong student in school, and she got straight A's. Basically, she experienced some anxiety while in nursing school doing case presentations because you have to stand up in front of a group, and that was that made her kind of anxious." 25:44 "One of the psychological tests, which I'll talk about a little bit later, is called the adverse childhood experiences measure, and that's that's something that asks an individual whether they went through what we would call adverse experiences or traumatic experiences as a child and and and an adolescent, and there are 10 of them, and if you have four or more of them, that puts you at higher risk for different kinds of adverse outcomes as an adult. She did not endorse any of those." 29:15 "What was happening toward the end of his 12-week paternity leave is that she was getting more anxious when she started in mid-October taking the zoloft she immediately began to have some difficulty. The anxiety did not get better. In fact, it got worse. There were some symptoms of depression. She immediately started having some really difficult insomnia and felt a lot of stress and so on and so in October and moving. Into November, she had hoped to return to work and planned to return to work, but it was not going to to work out for her because her symptoms were really difficult. So, in the middle of November, she texted her mother-in-law, Sue Clancy, who was at work, also a nurse, and she was in the emergency room at South Shore Hospital. She felt unwell." 33:02 "late November, early December, she began to experience what she called horrible, intrusive thoughts, and those thoughts were about harming herself, potentially, and as she continued to experience these kinds of thoughts later into December and January, they would occasionally be about harming the children, but for the most part, particularly early on, these were thoughts about possible suicide and harming herself. And the way she described it is, these thoughts would just pop into my head, and they included things like your brain is damaged, you need to kill yourself." 44:04 "One of the things that she thought was happening when she began taking that medication in October is that it was the medication itself was far from making the anxiety better, it was making it worse and keeping her from sleeping." "She thought that the the medication was actually making it a real problem for her to to sleep to feel she felt emotionally numb and that sort of thing, and so accompanying the bad insomnia with the apparent adverse responses producing the insomnia and other things was a real problem for her as she saw it." 49:56 "Your diagnosis bipolar two...." Heliburn continued testifying after the midday recess.