Books: The Episode: a True Story of Loss, Madness and Healing

Ann Kenny Mary, 2025. 288. The Episode: a True Story of Loss, Madness and Healing. HB: Sandycove, 978-1844886869. 18.99. ![Graphic][1]</img> Most of us go into medicine to help and to heal. While we learn to accept that this isn’t always possible, sometimes we do worse than simply not helping — sometimes we cause harm. By harm in this context, I am not referring to medical errors or hazardous prescribing but rather the kind of harm that comes from not caring, from being unkind, from treating patients as problems rather than people. Mary Ann Kenny describes this harm in her raw and intimate memoir, The Episode: a True Story of Loss, Madness and Healing . The book recounts her descent into psychosis after the sudden death of her husband — and the prolonged hospitalisation that followed several months later. It is a powerful and carefully documented account of Kenny’s inner turmoil and her outward experiences with the healthcare system. Kenny obtained and reviewed her full hospital records. Her ability to read, reflect on, and share these most intimate details that included nursing, medical, and child protection conference notes, is testament to her intellectual curiosity and deep personal courage. The book interweaves her own recollections with direct quotes from her medical records. It is a fascinating and well-written account — so compelling, in fact, that I read it in a single sitting. In the closing chapters, Kenny describes her episode as comprising three distinct but interlinked traumas: the first, the sudden loss of her husband, leaving … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif