We meet in Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel in Killiney, south Co Dublin. It’s near home for Mary Ann Kenny, and also near where her husband John collapsed one fine April day in 2015 while jogging, and died. His death left Kenny, a lecturer in German, and their two primary-school-aged boys stunned, grieving, their lives suddenly torn apart.
Over the following months as they groped through life, Kenny’s grief became intense, with depression and several physical and psychological symptoms, including delusions that her boys had taken her medication and been harmed. She lost touch with reality and developed psychosis, spending 10 weeks in a psychiatric hospital. It was a dark time.
Ten years later, life is healthy and happy and she has written The Episode, a memoir about her personal experience of severe mental illness. It’s remarkably detailed, drawing on her own memories and observations, and multiple medical and social-work files. There’s a dizzying array of professionals, medications, treatments. Professionals and friends are anonymised, as is a day-care centre and psychiatric hospital. She steers an arresting course between an academic’s rigorous research and pacy, insightful readability.
Today there’s no hint of what she’s been through. “I’ve been very good for a long time.” She’s calm, analytical, articulate.
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Many people go through grief, but hers was extreme, “particularly cruel, I suppose”. Because it was sudden. Because she had two small children (“it’s impossible to overstate the burden of that”). Because of her “aloneness”: John was an only child, her siblings lived abroad; she had very good friends but her main support came from her 90-year-old mother Bernie (“she’s the hero”).
Grief triggered a series of events, leading to psychosis. She talks about complex traumas: “I lost control of everything ... I was obsessed with this belief that I had damaged my children, ruined my children’s lives. It was one of the most traumatic things you could imagine. That there’s no hope for them.” And then, “what happened to me in hospital”, where, she says, “my identity was just torn to shreds”.
Writing The Episode has helped her tease out the interplay of her feelings of guilt. The feeling that she hadn’t protected the boys enough from life’s cruelties somehow became an obsessional belief that she had damaged them, and led to psychosis. Over a few months everything spiralled and she went from attending a day centre to being admitted twice to a psychiatric hospital.
She vividly portrays what it’s like on the other side of constant questions, over and over, from multiple healthcare professionals.
She’d like professionals “to see what it feels like at the receiving end”, she says.
After intense assessments, she went on to tell professionals in October 2015 that she wanted to harm her own children, and herself.
It’s shocking to read. She writes: “Why did I do it? Why did I say such appalling things – none of which was true and none of which I believed, even at the time, and all of which were guaranteed to make my situation so much worse? Because I thought I was living in a parallel realm and believed that what I was saying didn’t matter in the real world inhabited by everyone else?
“Because I was close to collapse, having barely eaten during the preceding weeks, because of the effects of the antipsychotic medication on my prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for executive functions?
“Because it seemed to me that the professionals with their faces of mistrust and frustration believed that I was guilty of something, and I myself thought I was guilty too? Because I had been asked the same questions over and over for two months and I couldn’t fight them off any more? Because I wanted to be agreeable and to give the medical staff what they seemed to be looking for?”
But having said what she said, “my fate was sealed”, she observes now.
There has to be a better way of treating somebody in such distress. I felt annihilated by my treatment, annihilated as a person
— Mary Ann Kenny
The reader feels the frustration of the constant interrogation, but feels pity for the professionals too.
Kenny knows this. She says “the worst of the lies, the self-incriminating details, I blurted out in the first 10 days. Then I stopped. I started to come to my senses. It’s incredible how quickly I actually regained my sanity after that, started to realise the delusional belief was wrong.”
[ How I coped when grief became my new realityOpens in new window ]
She realised, too, “the seriousness of what I’d said”.
Kenny acknowledges what the professionals must have feared, when she said she planned to harm her children and herself. “I never did have those plans and intentions ... There’s nothing more tragic than those cases, of a parent doing something to their children because they are mentally ill, maybe in ways not dissimilar to me.” However, she says: “I felt annihilated by my treatment, annihilated as a person, as a human being, as a mother, as a daughter, as a friend. I felt literally torn apart.”
Psychotherapy later, privately, helped her process the trauma of “losing my husband, losing my mind … Mostly I needed therapy to help me come to terms with my hospital experience”.
She observes, from reading about psychiatry as well her own experience of it, “they treat symptoms. But they don’t ask about the cause.”
Our psychiatric system, she says, is “all about risk assessment and risk prevention, for the severely mentally ill anyway, rather than care or therapeutic intervention for patients’ sake.”
[ Huge variations between hospitals in treatment of mental health emergenciesOpens in new window ]
She felt disempowered, she says. “I thought I was going to die in there. I thought my children were going to be taken away from me. There has to be a better way. This was a person in distress, suffering, who led a completely normal life up to the day her husband died. Something has happened to her, and we have to help her.” She felt “cast out. I felt a complete social failure. That is incredibly traumatic.”
It was eight months out of her life. She sometimes thinks of it as “having to break down in order to get the help I needed”.
But it was an episode. It ended. “And it never came back.” Ten years later, she’s still working. Her sons are in secondary school. “They’re absolutely wonderful. We’re a very, very happy, close unit, the three of us.”
The weird thing is, after the episode ... I have never looked back. I’ve never had a day’s depression since
— Mary Ann Kenny
“Maybe the drugs worked. Who am I to say they didn’t work?” Key was her delusions waning. “I stopped believing I had harmed my children.”
In her experience: “Antipsychotics, they dull your cognitive activity, as well as your emotional feelings.” With a self-destructive, delusional belief, “maybe that’s exactly what you need. If you become like a zombie, which I did, maybe that’s, in the first instance, beneficial.” Or “perhaps it was the passage of time”, and removal from daily life.
[ Adam Loughnane asked for help at a Galway hospital. Three hours later he was deadOpens in new window ]
“All I know is, I was no longer obsessing about this one thing,” and instead started to worry about “real-world worries. Maybe I just had no space left to worry about the imaginary thing ... And then I was better. It’s extraordinary. How could you get so ill and then you get better?”
Her experience puts in context how anyone can be vulnerable. Bad things happen; perhaps any person’s life and mind could fall apart. But also, that people can recover from severe mental illness. “I’m the living proof.”
“The weird thing is, after the episode ... I have never looked back. I’ve never had a day’s depression since. I have never been crippled by grief again. There’s a poignant, melancholic sadness about John ... I experienced an extreme collapse of my entire life. So when I got my life back, I was overcome with joy.”
Ultimately, “the whole experience made me stronger”.
The first draft of what was to become her book took three years, writing for herself, to make sense of it all. She felt she’d gained insights into the psychology of her breakdown worth sharing. “I think other people can learn from it. I didn’t set out to bash the professionals, and I don’t think I did.”
She has exposed her inner turmoil and psychiatric illness, for reasons that were “bigger than any need for privacy”. Reading her own records, she felt “that’s not my story. My personal truth about what happened to me is different from those files. And I want to put my story on the record.”
The Episode, A True Story of Loss, Madness and Healing, by Mary Ann Kenny is published by Sandycove, an imprint of Penguin Random House
