First appeared on Mad In The UK 14/04/25
(this transcript has been edited for length and clarity)
Cat: Could you tell me about yourself and how you came to write ‘The Episode’?
Mary Ann: I am an academic in my late 50s; I live in Dublin with my two children. I’ve lived in Ireland most of my life, bar a few good years I spent in Germany in my 20s.
I describe in my book how in 2015, I had a series of traumatic experiences, which were triggered by the sudden and unexpected loss of my husband, followed a few months later by a breakdown – a very severe episode of what I’ll call ‘mental illness’ or distress and madness, that involved psychiatric services, both as an outpatient, and then 12 weeks as as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital in Dublin.
After it was all over, I thought that the worst experience I’d had that year was my experience as a patient in hospital, which is an extraordinary thing to say, but completely true. After a number of years of bottling up this trauma….I decided to capture what had happened to me in book form. And that’s how I came to write ‘The Episode’. To begin with, I was writing for therapeutic purposes. But I recognised early on that I had an extraordinary, and also important story to tell.
Cat: Could you give MITUK readers a brief synopsis of your book?
Mary Ann: It’s a personal story; a memoir divided into two parts.
The first part provides a chronological account of my experiences in 2015 starting with the death of my husband and concluding eight months later with my discharge from hospital. I describe my breakdown in granular detail – where it came from, what it meant – and I provide a lot of detail about the delusional belief that held me in its grip during the psychosis. I also give a day-by-day account of my psychiatric treatment, both in hospital and as a day patient.
After I started to write it all up, I requested my medical files and my social work files, and I weaved them into the narrative, to provide a layer of authenticity, but also to illustrate the yawning gap, the growing gap…. between my needs and the treatment I was receiving.
The second part of the book is shorter but spans a longer period, starting immediately after my discharge, and tracking my outpatient treatment over the next two and a half years…. which mainly involved checking in with me for any reoccurrence of symptoms, and gradually weaning me off psychiatric medication, a process that concluded in late 2018. It was then that I started to really question what had happened to me, trying to understand it, and trying to find an outlet for those questions. Writing the book provided me with answers and helped me to determine how I feel today.
Cat: What you wrote shows remarkable courage. Where do you think that came from?
Mary Ann: So, ‘courage’ is a word that I’m hearing quite a lot from people who are becoming aware of my book – they tell me, I’m very courageous and very brave. And part of me kicks back against that, because I feel the word ‘courage’ suggests I had some kind of choice – about whether I was going to write this or not. Maybe the right word is ‘rage’ rather than courage. I was incensed about what had happened to me including what had been put on the record about me, and I was absolutely compelled to tell my truth as a counterpoint to the official records. But it’s interesting because I looked up the word ‘courage’ recently – apparently, it comes from the Latin for heart, and the original meaning is to speak from your heart. So maybe courage is a very good word after all!
How I found this courage is probably due to aspects of my personality or formation. One strong feature, I think, is a very pronounced sense of justice and injustice, and I felt that a grave injustice had been done to me. Another aspect is that I was raised to think critically about things, to keep a healthy scepticism, an open mind if you like. This doesn’t mean going through life rebelling, but just not taking everything I’m told by people in authority as gospel. And when I say ‘authority’, I’m thinking perhaps, of psychiatric authorities. And I would say I have a strong sense of myself, a very strong sense of self efficacy. I set myself this goal, and I had never written a book before. (I’d written some academic material), but I just thought, I can do this and I’m going to do it.
Cat: Are you able to give us some examples of what helped you to come to terms with what was a very traumatic experience of psychiatry on top of your recent tragic bereavement?
Mary Ann: For a long time after I was discharged, I just focused inwards. I focused on my little family unit, on my children, on my mother……as I say in my book, there was still a tiny flame of self-belief burning even at the end of my hospital experience…..and I focused on stoking that, and on rebuilding my identity, because so many aspects of my identity had come crashing, down – my identity as a mother, as a daughter, as a friend… aspects that had been undermined while I was in hospital.
I was also overjoyed to have my life back. I had my physical health, my mental health. I was back home, I had my children, I had my job, and I just went about focusing on all those things.
Then, after a few years, because I had this knot of trauma inside me that came bubbling up, I really struggled to find an outlet for that….I started reading…I had this burning sense of injustice, and I looked up the psychology literature but I couldn’t find any psychological studies to help deal with feelings of injustice. So I read fiction, non-fiction….. about miscarriages of justice…. the Guilford four, anything I could get my hands on to see what people who had experienced injustice had done to channel their feelings. And then I started to read about psychiatry. I read a lot of memoirs too….it was very helpful to read other people’s experiences, both of grief and mental illness. And I discovered Mad in the UK, Mad in America, Drop the Disorder, so I followed them quite closely. All of this helped. And music helped a lot – I compiled song lists of titles about strength and madness and loss and love and really let my emotions loose listening and singing along to those songs. I still do!
Over the years I visited different therapists with varying success, but eventually I found a trauma therapist who helped me with the physical sensations caused by my feelings of powerlessness and rage. At the end of all our work together, the therapist really wanted me to lock the whole thing away, put the whole narrative into a chest, lock it and throw the key away – throw the chest into the Irish Sea. But I wasn’t able to do that….. the book then definitely became my way of coping.
And it’s ongoing, because now I’m at the stage when I’m starting to talk to people who have read my story. I’m about to share it with the wider community here in Ireland and further afield, with my friends and my colleagues. And that gives a meaning to my trauma – the fact that other people can learn something from it and maybe be helped by it makes me really happy.
It’s coming up to 10 years and I feel I have found my own way to heal. I don’t think everybody could go through the recovery journey that I’ve been through. I don’t think everybody has the ‘resources’ – however we might understand that word – to write a book. I feel very, very lucky in the sense that I’ve found a way to heal through writing. I’ve gone through this severe episode of mental illness. I’ve come out the other side. I’ve gone through a very traumatic experience of treatment, and I have found a way to give it all meaning. And I just feel I’m doing it for all those other people who for whatever reason, can’t write a book.
Cat: Do you think your views about distress, or what’s commonly known as mental illness has been changed since your experiences?
Mary Ann: It was always obvious to me that people’s sadness and distress is a result of what happens to them in life. Insofar as I ever thought about it before, I was never persuaded by a purely medical model or that antidepressants alone could possibly be the answer if something terrible happens to you in your life……. (I think this is another reason why I ended up getting labelled as non-compliant, because I was always hesitant and sceptical about that stuff.)
I had never had any personal reason to reflect about severe distress or madness. I’ve known people who have been in a dark place, but that this could tip over into what we’ll call psychosis, that wasn’t something that I was previously aware of. Although I’ve been a reader all my life. I cut my teeth on Dostoevsky when I was 18. So, probably subliminally, I did have an understanding that people can go over the edge if they get driven far enough.
What I found so interesting in my reading of the literature about madness and mental illness, is the idea that you can view it as something not ‘dysfunctional’ – something functional… – that there’s a purpose to becoming mad in the way I became mad. Because if I look at it very clinically, abstractly and objectively, I survived. I got the help, even if the help was awry. In many ways, going mad did enable me to survive. And I just think it’s so interesting, that madness could be a survival strategy……. like an evolutionary psychology perspective.
So, I did learn things, but fundamentally what has always been so obvious to me is that distress comes from life experiences.
Cat: Thank you Mary Ann, I found your book a compelling read and was moved to tears at times, as well as feeling enraged at the lack of understanding by the mental health services, and the child protection services. I would recommend ‘The Episode’ to our Mad in the UK readers, and wish you every success when it is published by Penguin in May this year…
Pre-order ‘The Episode’ here