My descent into postpartum
A new mother recounts how psychiatric care that nurtured her bond with her baby helped to heal her mania
Ihave a story to tell you, but I’m afraid I’m a less than perfect narrator because there are crevasses in my mind that I fall through whenever I try to tell it. can pin my finger firmly on the moment I began to wonder whether something was really wrong. From behind me, I heard a child’s voice, small but determined. I contorted this way and that in search of its pestering, persistent owner, but I was alone. This was new. Later that evening, I watched a psychedelic display of electric lions, roaring tigers and the cast of the film Jumanji cavort on the bare blue wall. I wasn’t afraid, just captivated.
Yet a voice, this time my own, questioned how I could be seeing such a spectacle and suggested, gently, that perhaps those around me were right — things were very wrong.
Given that all of this was happening in my room in a psychiatric ward, I was a little late to the realisation party. There had been other not-sosubtle hints — in my belief that my baby had been swapped at birth, for instance, and that road signs were tailored messages for me.
I held these truths to be self-evident and never considered them to be odd, let alone symptoms of an illness.
Yet that’s precisely what they were — evidence of a sick and struggling brain. I was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, a severe mental illness that affects about one or two in every 1000 women soon after childbirth. It can cause a litany of symptoms, from anxiety and profound sadness to chattiness and euphoria.
Women with postpartum psychosis can rapidly cycle between moods and may experience hallucinations and delusions. Although it’s more common in women who have bipolar disorder, it can affect women who’ve never had mental health issues. It’s a psychiatric emergency that requires urgent treatment because the symptoms can start suddenly and get worse quickly.
At its most severe, it poses a risk of suicide. It can even lead to accidental harm to the baby or infanticide, though this is exceedingly rare.
Unfortunately, infanticide grabs headlines and so women who suffer postpartum psychosis often worry about the stigma of the disease. Many don’t seek help. One Australian study found that, of those women who had symptoms of postpartum depression, 41% had not sought help within nine months of giving birth. Often, women said they believed their symptoms were normal and would go away.
I can identify. I feel the fear of stigma keenly as I write this, afraid of how you’ll judge me as a mother and as a person. And for months, I too thought my symptoms were a normal part of motherhood and would resolve themselves. This was made easier to believe because the symptoms of postpartum psychosis can wax and wane.
Yet at the peak of my disease a nurse told me I was one of the sickest women she’d seen enter the ward. This shocked me. Sure, I was a bit anxious, a bit bothered, but surely not seriously ill.
Being a parent is meant to be hard, me and collected the milk. And that’s not the least dignified experience I’ve had since joining the ranks of motherhood.
In those days, I developed beliefs that I now see as the first daggers of disease stabbing my mind. I thought all the nurses were talking about me and had an ever-growing suspicion that my baby had been swapped.
Once back home, I felt anxious and thought that ninja social workers were watching me and plotting to take my baby.
I had to prove to the world that I was a model mum so the spying social workers wouldn’t see any signs of weakness. I therefore hid my suspicious thoughts and fears from everyone. Even my husband, who has been my best friend and confidant for more than 13 years, wasn’t aware of just how ill I was.
Without the help I needed, over the following weeks I became manic.
Five months after my baby was born, things had reached the point where I was terrified of leaving the house for fear of murderous social workers.
Eventually, with the intervention of a community health worker who picked up that something was amiss, I was admitted voluntarily to the mother and baby psychiatric unit (MBU) at St John’s Hospital in Livingston, Scotland. My husband and a nurse had to physically shepherd me to the ward, coaxing me with promises that my baby girl and I could leave again soon. That was an optimistic assessment.
It was a week before I could leave the room, my paranoid mind conjuring up a million ways harm would befall me in the wide-open savannah of the ward. This was to change as
One in five mothers suffers from anxiety, depression or psychosis during or after pregnancy