Hard road to healing and health

Breda O’Toole spent 23 years in Ireland’s medical and psychiatric services before finally meeting someone who asked her the question that allowed her to heal.

Starting in 1972, she was incarcerated in five psychiatric hospitals, suffered repeated electroconvulsive therapy, spent 11 days in a straitjacket and, until 1995, was prescribed a frightening concoction of drugs.

“They stole 23 years of my life,” says Breda, a warm, bright, vivacious woman, who – until a recent cancer diagnosis – had been drug-free for more than 30 years. That was something she could never have imagined during those decades in Ireland’s psychiatric healthcare system.

Her journey towards recovery finally began in 1995 when she had her first appointment with a clinical psychologist, whom she calls David – not his real name.

At that session, in Galway City, the first thing he said to her was: ‘What is it I can do for you?’

“He was the first person who ever asked me that,” she says, adding that she finally felt seen.

Even today, 30 years after that meeting, Breda’s gratitude to the counsellor is apparent.

She’s now sharing her story in a book that tells of her treatment. This was in system where most of the professionals she met did not listen to her – regarding her as a problem, rather than a person.

Unseen: A Memoir of Trauma, Ireland’s Psychiatric System and a Lifetime Spent Healing, which was written with clinical psychologist, Dr Tony Bates, was launched last week at Clifden Arts Festival. For Breda, a music teacher, who lives in nearby Cleggan, it was a homecoming of sorts because it was an event at the arts festival with Dr Bates four years ago that led to Unseen being published.

“If this book helps one person, then it will be worth it,” she says about a memoir that should be prescribed for anyone working in healthcare, especially in psychiatry.

It draws heavily on her medical records, which she retrieved under the Freedom of Information Act, and they are frightening reading.

In a 23-year period, this woman was misdiagnosed, incorrectly medicated, put in a straitjacket for 11 days and given 29 rounds of ECT that left her with lasting damage.

This was despite her knowing deep down, that her pain and illness stemmed from childhood neglect as well as physical and sexual violence.

But whenever she tried to raise this, she was ignored.

Her husband Tommy has told Breda that it was her own intelligence that repeatedly saved her while she was under the care of these people – and it’s hard to disagree.

Born in Dublin in 1949, she was just a few months old when she and her parents emigrated to London. When she was 12, they settled in Limerick and opened a shop. The 1950s were hard times and if the world outside was bleak, home offered no respite.

Breda’s father was violent and her mother didn’t intervene when he beat her. The eldest of a family of seven, she was largely neglected, viewed almost as a skivvy, working in the shop and expected to look after her younger siblings.

She didn’t make friends at school, where groups had already formed by the time she started, and where her English accent emphasised her outsider status.

It was in those unhappy circumstances that she joined a convent in Offaly at the age of 16, despite not having a vocation, she says with laugh.

Pictured: Breda O'Toole. One of the greatest joys in her life is being out in nature. PHOTO: JOE O'SHAUGHNESSY.