Bundle of joy can mean a world of woe for new moms
Postnatal conditions affect almost all mothers, whether it is baby blues or a psychotic episode
ESTRELITA Moses knew motherhood was probably not going to resemble the rosy picture portrayed in adverts, but she did not expect the extreme lows and urges to hurt her baby that came after giving birth.
“I had days when I thought I want to throw him against the wall. You do have those thoughts,” she said this week.
Moses, 39, a single mother from Cape Town, gave birth to Luca two years ago and suffered from postnatal depression afterwards.
Once she had been discharged, Moses felt overwhelmed at home without the help of nursing staff.
“I was pretty much on my own. I was scared, overwhelmed and in a lot of pain. My family were very supportive, though, and helped me a lot.”
Moses, who was in severe pain after her C-section, did not take medication for this at home because she did not want to be too drugged when looking after Luca. She now admits this was irrational because medicine that could potentially harm the baby would not have been prescribed to her. She struggled to breast-feed. “It is incredibly stressful because you feel inadequate. You feel you’ve failed — that your child is going to starve. You feel useless: if other moms can, why can’t I?”
Luca also had jaundice, which added to her stress.
“I felt like a complete, complete failure at my lowest.”
When Luca was six weeks old, his paediatrician prescribed medication to stimulate Moses’s milk production, which was also an antidepressant.
She did not realise that the antidepressant was actually an antipsychotic and that she needed to wean herself off it.
“I didn’t, so I had extreme lows.” She eventually stopped using it.
Moses said finances had been very tight, which also triggered stress. But, she said, the entire experience of motherhood was overwhelming.
It is stressful because you feel inadequate. You feel useless: if other moms can, why can’t I?
“It’s relentless. The sleep deprivation also does affect your mood cycle. You do at times get almost catatonic from a lack of sleep.
“And, sometimes, one gets a sense of how some mothers lose it completely and, well, snap. There were days when I had dark thoughts.
“It took almost 18 months to recover and there are still days when I struggle.”
Linda Lewis, a Cape Townbased psychologist who penned the book When Your Blessings Don’t Count — A Guide to Recognising and Overcoming Postnatal Distress, said there were varying levels of postnatal conditions.
Lewis, who experienced postnatal depression after giving birth in 1993 and again in 1995, said 90% of women got the “baby blues”, a milder form of anxiety. If this carried on for more than two weeks, it needed to be examined.
Women prone to this are very organised, ambitious and in control. “Having a baby is like handing them a hand grenade,” she said.
A mother can experience insomnia and loss of appetite and the feeling that her baby does not belong to her.
Lewis said some mothers even thought the only way out of their “living hell” was death. Many mothers thought of harming their babies.
The most extreme form of postnatal depression is postnatal psychosis, which is rare — one or two women out of a thousand experience it.
“It’s a psychotic episode. The woman may hear voices. They could tell her to harm her baby.”
She has treated a first-time mother who experienced it. The mother, who has since recovered, briefly thought she should kill her baby. “It was suffocation, to just put a pillow over the baby to make it look like a cot death,” said Lewis.
The condition is brought on by hormone and chemical imbalances after birth. Lewis said treatment included practical support at home, emotional support and medication.