I Was Not Mentally Ill, I Was Grieving! | Mary Ann Kenny
Irish academic Mary Ann Kenny talks to Stella O'Malley about being prescribed sertraline, hospitalised and threatened with the removal of her children after her husband's death was treated as psychiatric illness rather than grief. For European listeners the case is a cautionary study in how quickly distress becomes a diagnosis and medication becomes default care, a pattern clinicians in Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and beyond are increasingly asked to examine, including in services that treat gender-distressed young people.
Mary Ann Kenny is an Irish academic whose memoir, 'The Episode', recounts what happened after her husband died: ordinary, overwhelming grief that mental health professionals reclassified as illness. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley, Kenny describes being pushed toward professional help, prescribed sertraline, and left to cope with akathisia, a severe and often unrecognised side effect of antidepressants that can produce agitation mistaken for worsening mental illness rather than a reaction to the drug itself. The episode follows her case through a psychiatric referral and a day hospital programme, and into one of its most alarming turns: a threat from Tusla, Ireland's child and family agency, that her children could be placed in foster care. Kenny describes years spent trying to be heard by a system that had already decided what was wrong with her, and the difficulty of being believed once a psychiatric label had been attached. She also discusses what recovery eventually looked like, and why writing the book became part of reclaiming her own account of events. None of this is framed as a gender case, but it sits squarely inside the territory Beyond Gender has made its own: institutions that move quickly to medicate distress, treat compliance as improvement, and resist being challenged when the diagnosis turns out to be wrong. For a European audience, the mechanics will feel familiar well beyond Ireland. Prescribing rates for SSRIs have risen across much of the continent, from Sweden to France, and adverse effects like akathisia remain under-flagged in routine psychiatric practice in many health systems, not only Irish ones. The Tusla thread also resonates with broader European debates about the power child protection agencies hold over families navigating mental health crises, and how little recourse parents often have when a clinical judgement, once made, becomes very hard to overturn. Dutch, German and Nordic readers following disputes over gatekeeping in youth gender services will recognise the underlying dynamic: a profession confident in its own assessment, and a patient or family left to prove a negative. Kenny's closing point, that no one in the services involved was ever held accountable, is likely to land hardest with European clinicians and policymakers currently reviewing informed consent standards and complaints processes in mental health care. As EU member states continue reassessing how psychiatric and psychological services handle grief, trauma and gender-related distress alike, her story is a reminder that the people most failed by a system are often the ones least equipped, in the moment, to argue back. That imbalance, more than any single diagnosis, is what this episode asks European listeners to sit with.
