I Was Not Mentally Ill, I Was Grieving! | Mary Ann Kenny
25 August 2026
With Mary Ann Kenny
Ireland
Irish academic Mary Ann Kenny talks to Stella O'Malley about how ordinary grief, after her husband's sudden death, was reframed by mental health services as psychiatric illness. Sertraline brought on akathisia, a referral led to hospitalisation, and a threat of Tusla intervention put her children at risk of foster care. For a site tracking how European institutions handle vulnerable people under pressure to treat rather than listen, Kenny's account is a documented case of medicalisation without accountability, with direct parallels to concerns raised about gender services.
Mary Ann Kenny is an Irish academic whose husband died suddenly, leaving her to grieve while raising their children. What followed, as she recounts to Stella O'Malley, was not support for bereavement but a cascade of psychiatric intervention. Under pressure to seek professional help, she was prescribed sertraline and developed akathisia, a severe drug-induced agitation frequently mistaken for a worsening mental state rather than recognised as a medication side effect. That misreading set off a chain of escalating responses: a psychiatric referral, admission to a day hospital, and eventually the threat that Tusla, Ireland's child and family agency, could remove her children into foster care. Kenny's memoir, The Episode, lays out how a normal grief reaction was treated as a disorder requiring ever more intensive clinical management, with little apparent scrutiny of whether the diagnosis fit the person in front of the clinicians. For readers who follow the evidence behind gender-identity services across Europe, this case belongs to a wider, well-documented pattern: institutions equipped to treat distress sometimes default to medicalising it, and once a label is applied, systems built to protect can instead escalate harm. National reviews of mental health and child protection practice, including the Cass Review's broader observations about diagnostic overreach in under-evidenced areas of psychiatry, have repeatedly flagged the risks of treating normal human responses as pathology without robust diagnostic checks or built-in routes for a second opinion. The involvement of Tusla is particularly relevant to any site tracking how child protection and family law intersect with mental health practice in Ireland. A bereaved mother facing the possibility of losing her children because she was reacting to loss in an unrecognised way illustrates how quickly protective statutory powers can be turned against the very families they exist to safeguard, especially when clinical judgement is not independently reviewed. Kenny describes eventually recovering and channelling the experience into writing, but she is also clear that no service involved in her case has offered accountability for what happened. That absence of redress is itself a recurring theme in European debates about psychiatric and gender-related care: patients and families report harm, yet formal complaints mechanisms, regulatory bodies and oversight structures rarely produce acknowledgement, let alone correction of practice. The episode matters for this audience not because it concerns gender medicine directly, but because it documents, in granular and verifiable detail, how misdiagnosis, medication side effects and institutional self-protection can compound each other when a vulnerable person enters a mental health system. Those same dynamics, informed consent bypassed under pressure, dissent reframed as illness, and institutions slow to admit error, are precisely what evidence reviews and court findings elsewhere in Europe have identified in services treating gender-distressed children and adults.
