In her new memoir, Breda O’Toole uses her own experience to give an unflinching look at mental health treatment in Ireland across several decades. 

Using 23 years worth of psychiatric records, she tells her story of navigating a system  that, instead of helping her, frequently did the opposite. She faced misdiagnoses, incorrect medication, being bound in a straightjacket for eleven days, and being subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. Breda was treated as a problem, not a person.

But despite it all, she was determined to reclaim her voice, and her sense of self. She did find professionals who look at the person as well as the condition. One of those was Dr Tony Bates, a clinical psychologist of over 30 years, who wrote this book with her about a system that too often loses sight of the human being at its heart.

In this chapter, Breda offers a glimpse of the three years that she spent in a convent in Co Offaly as a teenager. 

CONVENT LIFE IN Brosna, County Offaly, run by the Salesian Sisters, was far from what I expected. Now aged 15, I had hoped for a nice life. I did not get it. Talk about from the frying pan into the fire.

A shrill bell rang out each day at 6.30am. We jumped out of bed, dressed quickly and lined up like soldiers at attention. The school was housed in a huge, intimidating building, surrounded by fields. We marched to the refectory, bound by the rule of silence, and ate breakfast. Daily chores were conducted in fear of the nuns. They were very stiff and stern, regimental, a distant authority.

Everything was clockwork. You would never be........

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