It was a bright afternoon in April 2015 when Mary Ann Kenny, a university lecturer, received a call that changed her life. Her husband, John, with whom she had two young sons, had collapsed while out jogging near their home in south Dublin. Kenny was told to get to the hospital as quickly as she could and to bring someone with her.
“I said to my colleague just beside me at work: ‘Something’s happened to John. I think he’s dead and I have to go to the hospital. Will you drive me?’ And sure enough, I was told in the hospital car park. Actually, the guard met me there, and he told me John had died.” He was 60 years old.
Struggling to cope with the shock of her husband’s death and the loneliness that engulfed her life in the aftermath, her grief turned to depression, which later progressed into psychotic delusions.
“I developed very suddenly, out of the blue, a delusional belief that my children had been harmed by my medication and that it was in some way my fault, and that belief took hold of me,” she tells Róisín Ingle on the Irish Times Women’s Podcast.
Kevin Barry: ‘You can almost fool yourself into thinking there’s no class system in rural Ireland’
The Brooklyn, Swords review: One star for the worst chicken burger I’ve ever tasted
Brianna Parkins: I envy Irish childhoods and the special confidence Irish children seem to have
After Dolly Alderton’s party, I decided to ditch the impostor syndrome that’s dogged me
“There was nothing else I could think of ... I believed somehow the children had swallowed my medication. I thought it was my fault, I thought maybe I’d left it lying around ... or maybe, worst-case scenario, that I had done it intentionally.”
The mother of two says she was completely “consumed” by this delusion, which led her to believe her sons had been “irreversibly damaged”, that their brains had been impacted and that they would “fail spectacularly academically” or “never be able to make friends”.
While attending a mental-health day clinic, Kenny divulged this worry about her children and the medication to one of the staff, who referred her on for in-patient treatment at a psychiatric hospital.
“I think by sharing it like that, I was crying out for help – for myself and for my children. That’s what I was doing by unburdening myself,” she says.
“It was dismissed as irrelevant ramblings, but there was a meaning to the whole thing and there was possibly even a purpose to the whole thing, which was to get help and – you know what – I did get help,” she says.
Kenny details this journey from the depths of despair, into psychosis and then back to reality in her new memoir, The Episode. In it, she reflects on her 12 weeks in psychiatric care, why she ultimately felt let down by the healthcare system and how she gradually found health and happiness again.
You can listen back to this conversation in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
