Mary Ann Kenny first met her husband in 2000, at a conference in Dundee. “It was acoup de foudre– ‘a bolt of lightning’,” the 60-year-old languages lecturer says with a smile. “We had finally found what had taken both of us a very long time to find.”
John was from Chester, Kenny was from Dublin, and the couple had a long-distance relationship until he moved to Ireland to live with her in 2008. “We had our two small kids, our lovely house, our friends; it just seemed like we had all our ducks in a row. It had taken a long time to get there – we had our kids a little bit later in life – but I felt that everything was perfect. Then John left my life just as suddenly as he entered it; one day he was there, then he was gone.”
In April 2015, three days after her 50th birthday party, Kenny came out of a work meeting to find she had a series of missed calls. She rang John’s phone and it was answered by a garda (police officer) who told her to come to the hospital and bring somebody with her.
“I knew, I just knew immediately – and I said to my colleague: something has happened to John; I think he’s dead.”
John had collapsed and died, age 60, from undiagnosed cardiovascular disease, while out jogging. “He was a very fit, healthy, clean-living man,” says Kenny. “My entire life came to a stop. Everything I had done prior to that – working, eating, drinking, socialising, enjoying myself – it all just ground to a halt. It was absolutely devastating.”
Plunged into grief, Kenny tried desperately to maintain a sense of normality for her young children. But over the following months, things were to get even worse.
Kenny went to see a therapist after John’s death – her first experience of therapy, having had no history of mental illness. “He said, your sadness, your distress, is completely within the norm and what’s to be expected – even though, at the time, I was impatient to start to feel a bit better,” she says. Her GP prescribed sertraline, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, to help combat symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Kenny was reluctant to take the medication. “I waited for more than 24 hours before starting the drug, agonising over whether it was advisable at all, and fearing an adverse reaction,” she writes in her book, The Episode. “Before going to bed on the evening of Sunday, 2 August, I took the prescribed dose for the first time. Some hours later, I awoke in a state of severe agitation. I was drenched in sweat, weak with nausea, and my legs and arms were prickling all over. I spent hours tossing in bed, gripped by terror over what was happening to me.”
Just as she had feared, Kenny appeared to be experiencing a rare but severe reaction. She only ever took three doses but the burning sensation that spread throughout her body continued for weeks, preventing her from eating, sleeping or “doing practically anything beyond the absolute necessities”.
She returned to the doctor and “the response I was given was, by and large, that this was a psychiatric problem. You need either a different medication, or you need more.” A psychiatrist prescribed clonazepam for her anxiety and venlafaxine, a serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor, for her depression, and referred her to the mental health service, where she started attending a day centre that offered group therapy, art therapy and drama and mental health workshops. It was 2016 before she saw her original therapist again, and then only for one session.
It was at this point that Kenny began to tip into paranoia. She developed a mistrust of authority figures, from the nurse who assessed her at the day centre to her children’s school principal who called her to check in. Everyone, she began to believe, had an ulterior motive.
“I thought they suspected me of illicit drug use and addiction,” she says. “My thoughts were getting ahead of reality – but reality itself was very precarious for me at that time.”
Kenny became increasingly worried that the authorities would accuse her of being unfit to parent her children, and that they would be removed from her care. She herself was one of five siblings, but the others had all moved abroad, and their mother was in her 90s; Kenny hired a nanny and friends helped out, but childcare remained a struggle.
Her mental state began to spiral, and she developed a dark and specific delusion: “Out of the blue, this idea got into my head: the children are behaving differently and badly, and something has happened to them to do with the medication, and it’s my fault.”
She became haunted by the idea that she had accidentally poisoned her children – and then that she had poisoned them deliberately. “They were aged eight and six at the time, they weren’t crawling around like babies trying to swallow everything – but it was almost like I thought they could. Then I started thinking, well, I left the bag [of pills] lying around somewhere, and then, I must have done it by accident, perhaps while cooking? I would go through it over and over again, trying to figure it out; it tortured me.”
In her book, she describes how she became “tormented by an image of my evil self standing over the cooker on Sunday evening, pouring pills into the simmering food with the depraved intention of causing harm.”
Kenny continued to attend daily group therapy sessions, keen to maintain the impression of normality in front of medical professionals, while also desperate to confess her imagined crime. Eventually, she blurted it out. “I remember the nurse’s worried expression,” she says in The Episode. “She wrote in her notes that I held all my beliefs ‘with great conviction’. It might be more accurate to say that the beliefs held me in their steely grip.”
Kenny was prescribed antipsychotic medication and admitted to a psychiatric hospital a few days later. She didn’t resist, despite disagreeing with the diagnosis of psychosis. “I was at the end of my tether and in some ways I was relieved to just hand myself over to other people, to surrender.”
During her time in hospital, Kenny says she spent 80% of her days “just lying on my bed, ruminating, staring at the ceiling, looking out the window, feeling a very strong sense of dread in my body. Of course I thought about John and the loss, but I couldn’t focus on it, because I believed I had destroyed my children’s brains. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
She was discharged after two weeks and encouraged to start attending the day centre again, which she did for another four weeks. Initially, she appeared to have improved – she’d been eating and sleeping much more while in hospital – but soon she lost weight again and became withdrawn.
“I started to talk to the mental health professionals about my delusional belief, and tell them that I still believed it, I had always believed it, I never stopped believing it,” she says. “I suppose things reached a crisis point.”
In October, a social worker informed Kenny that she would be making a child-protection referral toTusla, the child and family agency. After she missed one of the day centre sessions, a doctor and nurse arrived at her home and insisted she re-admit herself, voluntarily, to hospital (throughout her illness, she was never officially sectioned).
Kenny has since obtained her medical records. The admission summary for her return states that she “presented as ‘guarded’ during the admission process” and was “unhappy with having to come back to hospital”. There are also references to her having “blunted affect”, “poor eye contact” and “low rate and tone of speech”.
A week later, Kenny spotted that the door to her ward was open, and walked out. She planned to return home and resume childcare, but on finding her house empty called a friend in the hope of locating the children. The friend, who had indeed been watching her kids, promptly returned her to the hospital, where she was transferred to a high-security ward and watched by a member of the nursing staff 24 hours a day – “even when I went to the bathroom”.
“I felt mortified that I had left the hospital and come back,” she says. “I just could not believe how much trouble I had caused. My symptoms got worse and I believed I was living in a parallel world. I became utterly zoned out, and still, during that time, a lot of questions were being put to me about harm” – specifically whether she’d had any thoughts of harming herself or others, which she denied. Rather than discuss the enduring impact of her loss, or her apparent reaction to the medication, Kenny says she was regularly asked to rate how she was feeling on a scale of one to 10, and whether she’d experienced thoughts of suicide – “all things that would have been on [doctors’] checklists and that were never tailored to the reality of my distressing lived experience”.
The questioning continued and in the end, she says, she just “threw in the towel”. She “confessed to everything”, feeling almost euphoric at finally being able to give the answers she felt the medical professionals had been waiting to hear.
“I just said: fine, you’re right, I’m wrong. That was the tone of it. I think a narrative came into existence: that I had always, actually, had thoughts of suicide, homicide, infanticide. And it had very, very serious repercussions for me.”
Kenny quickly came to regret her false admission, calling it disastrous. “I wasn’t allowed to see my children for four weeks.” She tried to retract her statement but felt there wasn’t any “willingness to listen” – the narrative seemed to be set in stone.
Her treatment continued, with her medication altered. By November she was taking two antipsychotics, two antidepressants and a sleeping tablet, on top of the clonazepam she had been prescribed for anxiety. The delusions began to wane – giving way to a more physical ailment: severe constipation. The condition had progressed to such a stage that she was finding it difficult to walk, and would rush to the bathroom as many as 20 times a day. This was paired with a difficulty in passing urine, eventually diagnosed as a urinary tract infection. Reluctant to reveal the extent of the problem to medical professionals, she would wash her underwear secretly in the sink in her room.
As Kenny’s mental health continued to improve, she was granted visits with her children, first in the hospital, then at home. Before being discharged, however, she was required to attend a child protection conference, where the children were determined to be at ongoing risk of significant harm. Although this had little material impact on Kenny and her family, she was “devastated” that her children’s names were now on an at-risk register, where they would remain until they turned 18.
She was discharged in December 2015, on condition that she get regular visits from numerous health professionals, and spent Christmas Day with her children, her mother and her older sister, who was visiting from New Zealand.
“It’s extraordinary how fast I recovered,” says Kenny. By January 2016 she was able to return to work full-time. Her physical symptoms improved too, and her medication was gradually reduced. “After I came off antidepressants, I began to feel things more intensely, and it wasn’t just sadness over John’s death that I was noticing,” she writes. “More than anything, what I was feeling was anger over the powerlessness and indignities of my hospital experience two years previously.”
In time, and with ongoing therapy, Kenny was able to reflect on her experience more clearly. She also began reading psychology and grief literature – both academic publications and personal memoirs – before enrolling for a BSc in psychology in 2018. She came to view what happened to her as a series of three traumatic events: the trauma of losing her husband, then the trauma of losing her mind – and lastly, the trauma of her psychiatric treatment.
“There was no sense even from [the mental health service] that this was an isolated episode,” says Kenny. “There was never a prognosis which said I was going to get better.” She spent time ruminating on what could have been done better: “What if I hadn’t been discharged [from psychiatric hospital] the first time?” she asks in the book. “What if anyone had ever talked to me properly about losing John, or about my adverse physical reaction to the sertraline medication, or about the unwarranted feelings of guilt, or about why I said the things I said …”
On the advice of a psychiatrist, she composed a five-page letter outlining her concerns about the care she had received during her illness, and was invited to discuss them in a meeting with her social worker, which she found helpful. Mid-2019, about nine months after her final discharge from the mental health service, she received her medical records – at which point she had already embarked on writing her book. Retelling her ordeal was painful at first, but she was driven by a desire to share what she now understands about the world of psychiatric care, about which so many of us know very little. “If it hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t believe it,” she says.
Her sons, she writes, appear to have “emerged relatively unscathed from the ordeal of being separated from me only a few short months after the loss of their father” – something that she credits to the support she received from friends and her mother, who died in 2020. Her first therapist also encouraged Kenny to try to view the loss of her husband as an opportunity to live her life in a way that she might not have otherwise been able to. Today, she says, “it is true that I live my life at a much faster pace than I would have done had John still been around. We go away more – it’s a more active life.”
Having reconciled herself with the events of 2015, she views her story as one of resilience, of how she came to be stronger, more confident and even happier than she had been before she became unwell.
“My experience of those weeks was punishing and traumatising,” she writes. “But at least I survived … Once I was able to trust that I was mentally and physically well again, I was overcome with joy at being alive.”
The Episode by Mary Ann Kenny (£18.99) is published by Penguin Sandycove.