Still by the time Lucas arrived, Josephine was convinced she couldn’t be happier. “I fell in love with him immediately,” she remembers—and that was despite a traumatic three-day long labor, ending with stitches (a difficult labor is also another risk factor).
Then the incessant shrieking started and Josephine found herself feeling trapped, unable to escape Lucas’ crying. “It didn’t help I was feeling fat, tired, and sore,” she recalls.
In the following month, she came to resent her son. “I wanted Lucas to be quiet. Sometimes, I’d shout at him—then feel awful for what I’d done.”
Despite her guilt, Josephine plucked up courage to tell her health visitor how she was feeling. It led to a prescription for antidepressants.
That wasn’t the end of the problem. “I developed a rash and had to come off them,” she says.
Like Josephine, Maisie also had a reaction to the antidepressants she was given before being discharged from hospital with her son. “We were staying with my mother,” she recalls. “And one night, I felt so hot I tried to jump out the window. Luckily Mom stopped me. The doctor thought the drugs had made me hallucinate, so I binned them.”
After that, Maisie was offered counselling. “But that didn’t work because I didn’t like the counselor and stopped going.” At that point, Maisie moved out of her mom’s house and looked after Lucas herself. “But I did it on autopilot without caring,” she says.
Maisie was left without any medical help or a partner to support her—it won’t come as a surprise that single women are at greater vulnerability to postnatal depression.
But even with a loving partner, Josephine was on a downward spiral. “I stopped washing, or even cleaning my teeth—I looked terrible and smelled awful,” she says. “My partner did the cooking, cleaning, childcare, everything.”
The two women agree the most alarming symptom of their depression was the terrible dreams. In them, they were harming their babies.
“I threw Lucas out of the window to stop him crying in one dream,” Josephine says quietly. “That’s when I knew I had to see my doctor again.”
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