I Was Not Mentally Ill, I Was Grieving! | Mary Ann Kenny
25 August 2026
With Mary Ann KennyIrish academic Mary Ann Kenny joins Stella O'Malley to revisit a harrowing period after her husband's sudden death, when grief was treated as psychiatric illness. Heavy medication, hospitalisation and a threatened child-protection referral followed instead of space to mourn. The conversation matters here because it shows, from inside the system, how readily distress gets pathologised and 'treated' rather than understood — a pattern the podcast keeps returning to across different diagnoses and different lives.
Mary Ann Kenny is an Irish academic whose husband died suddenly, leaving her to navigate grief while raising her children. What should have been a period of mourning and support instead became, in her account, a collision with a mental health system that read her sorrow as a disorder to be managed. Stella O'Malley speaks with her about the memoir she eventually wrote, The Episode, and about the months that preceded it, when professionals she turned to for help responded with prescriptions, pressure and, eventually, institutional threats. The episode traces that sequence in detail. Kenny describes feeling pushed toward professional intervention, being prescribed sertraline and then experiencing akathisia, the agitated restlessness sometimes caused by psychiatric medication, which can be mistaken for worsening illness rather than a drug reaction. A referral to psychiatry and a stint in a day hospital followed, deepening rather than resolving the crisis. At its most frightening point, she faced a threat from Tusla, Ireland's child and family agency, raising the prospect of her children being placed in foster care while she was struggling to grieve and be heard. What makes this conversation relevant beyond one family's ordeal is the pattern it exposes: ordinary human suffering, in this case bereavement, getting filtered through a clinical lens that offers diagnosis and medication before it offers listening. That pattern is familiar territory for this podcast, which has spent episode after episode examining how professionals entrusted with vulnerable people can default to intervention over understanding. Kenny's story swaps gender distress for grief, but the underlying question is the same one the hosts keep asking of clinics and clinicians everywhere: what happens when a system is built to act rather than to sit with uncertainty. Stella, a psychotherapist herself, is well placed to draw out the clinical specifics here, questioning how a treatable, human response to loss became a pathway toward hospitalisation and the threat of losing her children. The discussion also covers Kenny's eventual recovery, her decision to write about what happened, and her frustration that no one within the services involved has been held accountable for the harm caused along the way. For listeners who follow this podcast for its scrutiny of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic practice, this episode offers something slightly removed from its usual subject matter but closely tied to its underlying concern: the medicalisation of normal human experience, and the damage done when professionals mistake distress for disease. Kenny's willingness to describe exactly what was done to her, and what it cost her, gives the conversation its weight. It's a reminder that the questions this podcast asks about young people and gender identity apply more broadly to anyone whose pain gets handed a diagnosis before it gets a hearing.
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