Postpartum Depression Article I wrote/coping tips
Q.In light of the Texas murders and the more frequent than usual postings about PPD, I thought I would share an article I wrote after Suzanne Killinger-Johnson killed herself and her baby in Toronto last year. At the bottom of the article there are also some really good coping tips for PPD sufferers. Feedback and questions encouraged!
A.Earlier this year a Toronto, Canada, a woman named Suzanne Killinger-Johnson jumped in front of a subway train with her six-month-old baby in her arms. Her baby died instantly and she passed away in hospital not long after. During the uproar that followed this tragedy, I heard so many people say in disgust, "What kind of mother do something like that to her child?". I was not disgusted when I heard this news, I felt so sad for Suzanne, her baby and her family and I felt exceptionally fortunately that my baby and myself had escaped a similar fate. I know that most people who read the news and watched the reports on television found it incomprehensible that a mother could take not only her own life, but that of her child. It seems especially hard to imagine because this woman was a doctor, someone who made her living helping other people deal with emotional problems. Unfortunately, her story is painfully familiar to me. I am the mother of a beautiful son named Ben. Before I had a child I did not think that I was capable of feeling an emotion as strong and as pure as the love I feel for him today. However for the first few months of his life I had severe Postpartum Depression and was not only emotionally incapable of truly loving him, I had fantasies of ending both his life and my own. I am a social worker, childbirth educator and doula. My husband and I planned our pregnancy and looked forward to being parents. Because of my career, I already had a very broad and realistic basis of knowledge about pregnancy, childbirth and caring for an infant and have always read everything I could get my hands on about the subject. I truly believed that the world would be a better place if everyone was as prepared to be a parent as I was. But all my preparation and education was no help when the "Baby Blues" hit me like a ton of bricks when my baby was five days old. I had had a great birth experience, 8-hour labour, no meds, wonderful doctor, doula, and my whole family in delivery to welcome my son. It was everything I had wanted the birth of my first child to be. So I figured I'd wait it out for a few days and I would be back to normal. But it just wouldn't go away and was, in fact getting worse. I thought I had the flu because I couldn't swallow food and I had diarrhoea so bad that every time I sat down to go pee, I also had a BM. I couldn't sleep - even when Ben was sleeping right next to me in his crib beside the bed (so much for co-sleeping, I was too paranoid of rolling on him). If I did fall asleep, I would wake feeling panicky and not be able to settle down again. I cried all the time, I couldn't eat, I had anxiety attacks, I was terrified to be left alone and couldn't leave the house. I couldn't believe that now that I was a mother, I felt so unprepared, overwhelmed and was sure that all the other mothers of the world had just played a cruel joke on me by not telling me it could be like this. After a couple of weeks I had to admit to myself that something was very seriously wrong and that I was likely suffering from Postpartum depression, but was so ashamed of my feelings and so afraid I would have to stop breastfeeding (the only good thing I felt I was doing) to go on medication that I continued to suffer quietly telling no one, not even my husband Every second of every day suffering with PPD can feel like hours. Every waking minute actually hurt to be alive. My whole body felt like how your stomach feels when you have cried and cried for so long that you have nothing left of yourself but a hollow ache. It felt like a hunger pain but so much more painful, like when you get the wind knocked out of you and can't catch your breath. I would cry and cry and when I wasn't crying the pain was even worse because on top of everything, it took so much strength I didn't have not to cry. I would look at Ben and instead of that all-encompassing love I had been told mothers feel for their children, I would feel nothing. Every bit of emotional energy in me, I used up in just getting through the day. I had nothing left over for anyone else, even for my beautiful baby. The guilt and shame I felt was overwhelming. What almost sent me over the edge was the fantasies. PPD fantasies are like having a VCR in your head on "loop" playing the same images over and over again. No matter how hard I tried I could not get rid of the images of myself dropping Ben; hearing the sound of his body hitting the floor. I would fantasize about going to his crib and finding him dead of SIDS and being relieved. The guilt for these horrible thoughts was unbearable. Finally it got to be too much, I was starting to fantasize about running away or killing myself and when killing myself started looking like the better option, I swallowed my pride and called our local health unit, and between sobs, told them what was going on. I then called my husband at work and told him he had to come home right away. The Health Unit got me in touch with a wonderful woman, Pat, who started me on the road to recovery. Pat was an RN who was knowledgeable about PPD, had gone through it herself, and who looking back, I now believe may have saved my life. Trying to get treatment for my illness was harder than I had expected and added to my feelings of frustration. I chose to leave my family doctor over issues of how my illness was treated. While she did prescribe an antidepressant compatible with breastfeeding, I was told it would take up to 6 weeks to start working and she refused to prescribe me anything for my anxiety, even though I hadn't slept more than two hours a night in weeks. I ended up getting my prescription for Ativan (a mild sedative) from a local paediatrician who ran a breastfeeding clinic and assured me it would not harm my baby. Medication for PPD is a very personal decision but in my situation I felt that I needed to take drugs in order to give my brain time to heal, so that my body could begin to heal, and I could then start to deal with the normal adjustments to motherhood. Pat found me an excellent Doctor who took the time to talk to me about how I was feeling, monitor my medication properly, and scheduled me for weekly appointments to check my progress. I also joined the support group that I now run. I cannot say enough about how important it is to share and work through your experience of PPD with other women who have gone through the same thing. Many women I have spoken with claim the support group helped them even more than the medication did. Once on medication it took about 6 months for most of my symptoms to disappear. Since my recovery, I have been educating myself about Postpartum Adjustment and have become the facilitator and co-coordinator of The Postpartum Support Program of Quinte. I have slowly overcome the unbearable shame that comes with Postpartum Depression. What turned me back from the road to suicide and thoughts of harming my baby? Getting professional help. In all likelihood, though, like the overwhelming majority of women with PPD, I would never have actually acted on my frightening fantasies, they were merely a symptom of my illness; misfirings of the chemicals in my brain. I started to truly heal when I began talking about my experience. I had a real breakthrough the day I told my husband and my parents about the horrible fantasies. It felt so good not to have to be alone with them in my head anymore. I now had others to share the burden and remind me that thinking these thoughts are normal when you have PPD and do not mean you are going to harm your baby. I had Postpartum Depression and Dr. Killinger-Johnson (the woman from Toronto), had a variation of this; Postpartum Psychosis, which is much rarer (1-3 women in 1000) and much more severe. Postpartum Psychosis sufferers sometimes experience an altered reality, actually believing they hear voices commanding them to kill their children or themselves. Sometimes a woman with PPD's symptoms can worsen if they go untreated and she may experience psychotic symptoms that can escalate to the degree that she becomes a threat to herself and her child. It is possible that this was the case with Dr. Killinger-Johnson. But how could this have happened to a woman who was a therapist and a doctor? Why did she not seek help before things got so bad? Well if you are asking that question then you are seriously underestimating the absolutely overwhelming shame that comes with Postpartum Depression. Perhaps, like me she was afraid of loosing professional credibility. I was convinced that I could never work again. After all who would hire a woman to give them advice on pregnancy, birth and newborn care who had failed at these very things? I can't help but think that Suzanne might have felt the same. Perhaps like me, she was afraid of disappointing her friends and family who expected her to be so good at motherhood. In our society, we offer little or no practical support for new parents. Families often live hours away, and new parents rarely ask for help because they are expected to handle things on their own and to be blissfully happy doing so. It is difficult enough to ask for help when you experience a ...
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