Mother reveals horror of rare psychosis after giving birth to her daughter – and her six-month journey to recovery and returning home
‘I heard voices coming from the radiators’
WHEN Katy Chachou gave birth to her baby daughter, she was happy and excited to be bringing her little girl home.
But within a few days she began experiencing terrifying delusions.
She believed there were voices coming from the radiators and that TV newsreaders were sending her messages. She started writing obsessive lists of how her baby was feeding.
When baby Sophia was just eight days old, her husband George would wake to find Katy missing from their bed.
He later found her in the garage eating chocolate in the middle of the night – an episode that Katy doesn’t remember.
The next day, she was sectioned to an acute psychiatric ward, and later a mother and baby unit. It would be six long months before she would be discharged.
Katy, now 40, was suffering with postpartum psychosis, a rare but serious mental illness that can affect women in the days and weeks after they give birth.
Typical symptoms include restlessness, delusions, confusion, a manic mood, depression, feeling suspicious or fearful and behaving in a way that is out of character.
Katy, a former air hostess for British Airways, gave birth to daughter Sophia at Birmingham Heartlands Hospital in November 2011.
It was a traumatic 48-hour labour during which her baby needed an emergency delivery with forceps.
“She had got stuck. I was really scared and I had my eyes closed a lot of the time,” recalls Katy.
“I was taken up to the maternity
ward afterwards. I was scared because I’d never been in a hospital before.”
She spent three nights in hospital before finally being allowed to back to her house in Solihull.
When Katy and Sophia got home, the new mother became obsessed with breast-feeding Sophia, trying every 10 minutes.
She began writing lists of how long she was feeding Sophia, and noting what time it was.
Meanwhile, she hadn’t slept since the birth. When she did try to rest she would just lie in bed while her mind was spinning with ideas.
“I’d go to lie down and I just couldn’t rest,” she remembers. “My brain was in overdrive.
“Next day I got worse, and I couldn’t hold a proper conversation. I was talking about four or five things at once. I hadn’t slept at all, not even for five minutes. Looking back, I don’t remember everything, but it was like I was in my own little world.”
Husband George began to notice that Katy was behaving strangely. She was asking visitors to bring sweets and fizzy drinks with them, something that she’d never been interested in before.
But when he brought up his concerns with friends and family, they brushed it off as nothing to worry about.
Then, when Sophia was five days old, Katy was feeding her in the middle of the night when she started hearing voices.
“I started hearing noises coming from the radiator in the room,” she says. “I thought I could hear voices.
“I woke my husband up and told him that he had to get up and bleed all the radiators for me. I was really scared.”
Often, women experiencing postpartum psychosis will not realise themselves just how ill they are.
Typically, it will be their close family members who will recognise their change in behaviour.
“I started having a lot of colour associations,” says Katy. “Every time I saw colours they would mean something, and I would be thinking ‘Is that a message for me?’.
“It was similar with the television. I wondered whether the newsreader was trying to give me a message. It became scary.
“It all came to a head when Sophia was eight days old. My husband woke up in the middle of the night and I wasn’t in bed.
“Panicking, he looked round the whole house, only to find me on the floor in the garage, eating chocolate.”
The next morning, Katy’s husband George took her to their local GP’s surgery, who told him Katy needed to go to the local community mental health centre at the Lyndon Clinic.
Katy was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and was admitted to an adult acute mixed ward for three-and-a-half weeks.
Later, a bed was found at the Mother and Baby Unit in the Barberry Centre in Birmingham, part of Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust.
It was to be home for mother and baby for almost six months.
“When I was first admitted to the mixed ward I was sedated because I needed to rest,” says Katy.
“When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was, and my first thought was ‘where’s my baby?’. It was terrifying. But once I was moved to the mother and baby unit it was such a different place.
“When I arrived
I had no confidence at all about how to look after my daughter. But there were nurses there to help me, and also to help me with my mental health.
“It was amazing really. There were lots of activities on the ward, like taking her for our first walk, which really helped me.”
Within a month, Katy had recovered and was considered well enough to be discharged just before Christmas 2012.
But Katy quickly suffered a severe relapse of depression, where she felt she didn’t want to eat, wash or get out of bed. Weeks later she experienced a manic episode, during
I wondered whether the newsreader was trying to give me a message. It became scary
which she explains she felt like she could ‘rule the world’.
“I was full of ideas, and as you get higher and higher you start to feel like you’re out of control,” she says.
Katy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, triggered by postpartum psychosis.
It would be another five months before she would be well enough to finally go home with her baby.
“Looking back, when I was admitted to the mother and baby unit was when our bond really began to develop,” she says.
“The most important thing is to have hope. You can feel so low in hospital. But you can get through it and you can get better.”