I Was Not Mentally Ill, I Was Grieving! | Mary Ann Kenny
25 August 2026
With Mary Ann Kenny
institutions
A memoir by Irish academic Mary Ann Kenny reframes acute grief after bereavement as psychiatric illness - and what followed once that label was applied. Her account of medication, hospitalisation and a child-protection threat is a case study in how institutions respond to distress with diagnosis and control rather than time and support, a pattern this podcast keeps tracing across very different kinds of human suffering.
Mary Ann Kenny is an Irish academic whose memoir, The Episode, recounts what happened after her husband died. Overwhelmed by grief, she sought help and instead found herself drawn into a psychiatric system that treated her mourning as a disorder to be managed rather than a loss to be lived through. Medication followed, then hospitalisation, then - most chillingly - the involvement of Tusla, Ireland's child protection agency, raising the prospect that her children could be taken from her. Stella O'Malley speaks with Kenny about how quickly ordinary grief was converted into a clinical problem, and how each subsequent intervention compounded the harm rather than addressing the original pain. A reaction to sertraline bringing on akathisia, a referral into psychiatric care, a day hospital placement: the chapters of the conversation trace an escalation that had its own momentum, largely detached from what Kenny actually needed, which was time, support and someone willing to sit with her sorrow. The episode is not about gender medicine, but it belongs on Beyond Gender because it is about the same underlying machinery the podcast exists to scrutinise: professionals who, faced with distress they cannot easily categorise, reach for diagnosis and treatment protocols rather than patience and listening. Grief has no DSM code that captures its texture, yet it can still be sedated, hospitalised and pathologised once it enters a system built to process illness rather than meaning. That mismatch between what a person is experiencing and how an institution is equipped to respond is the throughline connecting this story to the podcast's usual territory of youth gender clinics and rushed referral pathways. What makes Kenny's account valuable beyond its own devastating particulars is the light it throws on accountability, or the lack of it. She describes a system that could escalate its involvement in her life, threaten the custody of her children, and ultimately step back once the crisis passed, without ever being made to answer for what it got wrong along the way. That absence of a feedback loop - no one obliged to ask whether the intervention helped, or ask why a grieving woman required a correctional threat to get her life back - echoes concerns raised elsewhere about medical and therapeutic institutions that answer to protocol rather than to the people in front of them. For listeners more used to the podcast's focus on adolescents and clinics, Kenny's story is a reminder that the same institutional reflexes can appear anywhere emotional distress meets a system with power to diagnose, treat and intervene. Evidence, humility and a willingness to simply accompany someone through pain remain in short supply whenever process substitutes for judgement. Kenny's recovery and the writing of her book stand as a counter-argument: that naming what actually happened to her, plainly and without institutional cover, is itself part of how she got well.
