I Was Not Mentally Ill, I Was Grieving! | Mary Ann Kenny
Irish academic Mary Ann Kenny tells Stella O'Malley how ordinary grief after her husband's death was treated as psychiatric illness, leading to heavy medication, hospitalisation and a threat from Tusla to remove her children. For Irish listeners it is a stark warning about how mental health and child-protection services here can misread grief, and why psychotherapy and genuine listening must come before diagnosis and drugs.
Stella O'Malley sits down with Irish academic Mary Ann Kenny, whose memoir 'The Episode' recounts what happened after her husband died and she turned, understandably, to grief. Instead of being met with the kind of grounded, compassionate support that grief requires, Kenny describes an escalating encounter with Irish mental health services that reframed her sorrow as mental illness, leading to heavy medication, hospitalisation and ultimately a threat from Tusla, the State child and family agency, to place her children in foster care. For an Irish audience this is not an abstract case study. Tusla and the HSE's mental health services are the institutions many Irish families turn to in crisis, and Kenny's account raises hard questions about how those services respond when a person is grieving rather than clinically unwell. The episode traces her path from initial pressure to seek professional help, through a prescription of sertraline that produced akathisia, a distressing form of inner restlessness, into a psychiatric referral and day hospital care that seems to have deepened rather than eased her distress. As a psychotherapist practising in Ireland, Stella O'Malley brings a clinical lens to the conversation that will resonate with Irish therapists, GPs and anyone who has sat in a HSE waiting room wondering whether a diagnosis fits the person in front of them. The discussion of the Tusla threat is particularly significant for Irish listeners, since it touches on how child protection powers can be invoked in ways that feel punitive to parents who are already struggling, rather than supportive. That intersection of psychiatry and child welfare is a live concern for Irish families navigating services that are often under-resourced and overstretched. Kenny's eventual recovery, and her decision to write about it, speaks to something increasingly discussed in Irish mental health circles: the importance of distinguishing normal human grief from pathology, and the risks of over-medicalising distress that time, support and good psychotherapy might otherwise resolve. Her account of the lack of accountability from the services involved will strike a chord with Irish readers familiar with ongoing debates about oversight and redress within the HSE and Tusla. While the episode is a personal story rather than a policy document, it lands at a moment when Irish mental health advocates and politicians are scrutinising how community and acute psychiatric services handle bereavement, and how far child protection thresholds should extend into cases of parental distress. For Irish listeners, Kenny's story is a reminder that compassionate, well-trained psychotherapy, not reflexive medication and institutional threat, should be the first response to grief.
