I Was Not Mentally Ill, I Was Grieving! | Mary Ann Kenny
25 August 2026
With Mary Ann Kenny
Ireland
Irish academic Mary Ann Kenny tells Stella O'Malley how grief after her husband's sudden death was treated as psychiatric illness: pressure to seek help, an SSRI (sertraline) that triggered akathisia, psychiatric referral and day-hospital treatment, and a threat from Tusla, Ireland's child and family agency, to place her children in foster care. From this site's angle her memoir, The Episode, is a documented case study in how Irish mental health services and child protection can intersect around ordinary bereavement, and what happens when no service later accounts for it.
Mary Ann Kenny is an Irish academic whose memoir, The Episode, recounts what happened to her after her husband's sudden death left her grieving and overwhelmed. In this episode she tells Stella O'Malley how ordinary bereavement was reframed by professionals as a psychiatric emergency. Her account matters here because it sets out, in granular detail, how Ireland's mental health system can respond to acute grief, and what that response can cost a parent trying to hold a family together. Kenny describes coming under pressure to accept professional help, then being prescribed sertraline, a widely used SSRI antidepressant within HSE-linked mental health services. She developed akathisia, a recognised and well-documented adverse effect of SSRIs involving severe inner restlessness and agitation, which can itself be mistaken for worsening mental illness rather than a drug reaction. Her experience illustrates why clinicians are advised to screen for akathisia before escalating psychiatric treatment, since missing it risks higher doses and more intensive intervention for a problem the medication helped create. From there she was referred into psychiatric care and treated through a day hospital, a model used across Ireland's HSE mental health services as a step between outpatient appointments and full admission. The chapters covering this period trace how a bereaved woman moved through referral, diagnosis and institutional treatment on a timeline she experienced as escalating rather than stabilising, a pattern worth weighing against how grief and clinical depression are meant to be distinguished in assessment. The most alarming turn is the threat of Tusla involvement. Tusla is Ireland's statutory Child and Family Agency, with legal powers to assess child welfare concerns and, in the most serious cases, seek care orders. Kenny describes facing the prospect of her children being placed in foster care while she was being treated as a psychiatric patient, a convergence of mental health treatment and child-protection process that raises concrete questions about how assessments made in one system feed decisions in another, and what safeguards exist for a parent in that position. She ultimately recovered and went on to write her memoir, setting out, chapter by chapter, the sequence of medication, diagnosis and institutional contact she went through. The conversation closes on accountability: Kenny says no service involved in her care has acknowledged what happened to her. That absence of a formal response is itself worth recording, since it points to the gap between the complaints and review mechanisms that exist on paper within Irish mental health and child protection services, and how they functioned in practice in her case.
