There is light after postpartum depression
Mother fought her way back from darkness with help of medication and therapy, and by talking with and listening to others
Part 2 of a three- part series
At a time when new mothers are expected to celebrate the arrival of their child, Shana Calixte found herself rapidly descending into postpartum depression.
It happened after she gave birth to a boy in 2006, she says, and she did everything she could to keep the problem from her partner, friends and family.
“I was having a lot of anxiety about going out of the house and a lot of intrusive thoughts about my son being harmed by me or others,” says Calixte.
Severe postpartum depression is a serious disorder. “With postpartum depression, you worry about the children as well as the mothers,” says Heather Stuart, a professor in the department of community health and epidemiology at Queen’s University.
“It’s important to get the person appropriate medical help as quickly as possible to make sure that the situation doesn’t get to the catastrophic level where people are at risk.”
“I had a real dislike of motherhood and of my child,” says Calixte. “And you don’t want to talk about that because you’re supposed to love and care for your child. I was caring for him but I really resented doing it.”
She very much wanted to have the child. “Because my partner and I are lesbians, we had gone through extra steps to get this baby. This was a very planned child and my partner was very supportive, but I still experienced intense depression and had all sorts of conspiracy theories about people spying on us.”
Calixte says her recovery came about through medication, therapy and becoming involved in consumer rights. Now the executive director of the Northern Initiative for Social Action, a consumer survival network run by and for people with mental illness, she says “hearing other people’s stories and sharing my own and not worrying that people are judging me has been one of the most important parts of my recovery.”
In 2010, that recovery was put to the test when her partner gave birth to a baby. “I was really worried that I would experience postpartum depression again, even though I didn’t have all the biological associations,” she says. “I had a lot of triggers back to when I had given birth, specifically around the [ baby’s] crying and I did nurse the second baby too. I went through a slight depression, but nothing like the first time.”
That, Calixte points out, could partly be attributed to the changed situation of the couple. They have been together for 10 years.
“When I had my baby, we were both graduate students in residence and didn’t have access to our own transportation. Now, we live in our own house in Sudbury, have a car and we both have full- time jobs. My partner also found a community of other new mothers. I had missed that. I was mainly alone or with other graduate students to whom babies were very foreign.”