When it comes to things like maternal mental health there are some more common topics, like depression and anxiety but there are also a few not so common topics. This week I wanted to touch on one of those not so common topics and discuss Post-Partum Psychosis. PPP is a rare psychiatric condition that exhibits symptoms of mania, severe depression, confusion, loss of inhibition, paranoia and hallucinations. I wanted to know more about this rare condition and really dive into what it was really like to live with, and not just some textbook definition. This can happen to any mother, and as mothers we need to support each other so I wanted to put a face to PPP and talk to someone who has actually been through it.
The mama I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with has been open and vulnerable with her struggle and has graciously allowed me to share with you all, her story. She has asked to remain anonymous but to remember that this can happen to anyone and that it is vitality important to check in with the mothers in your life.
“It’s one of those things that has to be talked about WAY more and what ever I can do to create that awareness out there, I would love to be a part of. “
What you are about to read might be hard for some readers to hear but it needs to be heard. The power of sharing your story so that others can see that they are not alone and that it is okay to seek proper help is the purpose behind being so open and vulnerable.
**Names have been changed to keep anonymity**
Here is her story...
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When I was pregnant with my first it was obviously all new to me, the whole experience of pregnancy. Everything from the growing belly, feeling kicks, and even the hormonal swings. But it was all new, I had heard of pregnant women feeling hormonal so when I started experiencing some intense symptoms, I didn’t know that what I was feeling wasn’t normal. I think a huge thing too is that it doesn’t just happen to women after having a baby, it can happen during pregnancy too. It is so important for people to understand that you are not just having a hormone change after giving birth, you are having a hormone change from the time you conceive that child. My Psychosis started when I was pregnant with my first child and lasted until they were about 5 months old. After that I was just left with PPD, which was still awful but I was happy that the hallucinations had stopped. I was bawling constantly for 3 months after she was born. Like every single day for hours at a time. Over things like clipping her toe nails, cleaning her bum, thinking about how helpless she was without me this little girl would not survive. You know I would think some really twisted shit.
When I got pregnant the first time, something wasn’t right but I didn’t know what that was. I thought that was just anxiety about having a baby but it got dark real fast and then it got darker after I had her. But I knew when I got pregnant it was an extreme unnecessary amount of anxiety. I know people can get nervous thinking “omg I’m going to have a baby” but it was extreme, I would not go near any of the recommended foods on the “do not eat list” and when people around me would eat tuna or drink coffee I instantly thought “how could you expose me and my unborn baby to that!”. So, it started out as something innocent like that, then it spiraled into something worse. I tried to hurt myself and the baby and I didn’t mean to. And I experienced extreme amounts of rage.
Another big red flag was that feeling superior was really big for me. I felt like I was the only one who was capable of loving my daughter and I also felt like if I allowed her to bond with anybody, she would love them more than me. I would not allow anyone to hold her, or bond with her an I avoided all outings as much as possible because I didn’t want anyone to do a better job than me so I felt very superior. The superiority was a delusional thing, it’s not that I actually wanted to think that way, I was just completely delusional to reality. I literally believed that I was the only one who was able to love her and take care of her. A lot of people think that it is just a new mom thing and it’s not. I think that it’s part of a mood disorder. That could be the first clue that a mom is going through something. It’s the amount of expectation that she’s already put on her shoulders that comes with the being superior, like “if you don’t agree with me, you don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know my kid or our situation. The way you raise your kids aint right because it’s not the way I’m doing it” it’s a really weird place to be in mentally.
It got so bad that I wouldn’t speak to anyone in my husband’s family, not one person and a lot of people thought I was mean (which I defiantly came across that way). But I thought “they can’t hold her, because they won’t do it right, or they might not be smart enough to not drop her” and of course that’s not realistic.
When I looked it up I didn’t “fit the symptoms” so I thought I was losing my mind. But I had the more severe side, and some of the symptoms I did have and some they didn’t talk about because they were “rare”. They say psychosis is rare, and I don’t think that is really is that rare. You know it might not happen as often but I think a lot of women have had some form of it maybe and not even realized it.
Things started to escalate when my husband went to drive his mother to a dentist appointment and I was PISSED that he wasn’t with me. Like I'M PREGNANT and why wasn’t he right beside me, a real extreme sense of neediness. And when I thought he wasn’t doing what he should be doing as a husband I went from zero to ten in a second. Such anger that morphed into trying to hurt my belly, I didn’t mean to. I don’t know what was going on in my head but I started to realize that this might not be normal. I kept that very quiet and I didn’t tell people that and my husband never knew. Then once I had her I could not stop crying, I literally could not stop and I alienated myself from everything and everyone. Then it started with the snapping out of reality and not knowing what was real and what wasn’t.
Once she was born, I was starting to have some serious hallucinations. In once instance I was at my MIL and I was being very protective and was basically hovering over her shoulders any time she had my daughter. I happened to have a hot coffee in my hand and my MIL said “I think Charlotte needs a butt change” so she laid her down on the floor to change her, and I took my scalding hot coffee cup and dumped it on my child’s face… or so I thought… it was so real! I felt the gesture, I felt it empty and I saw it hit her face and I saw the steam and heard the screaming. I can’t explain it but when I opened my eyes, her butt was changed, my cup was still full and I had it to my lips like it never happened. It was so real that I actually thought it had happened but it never actually happened. I don’t know why I snapped into it or how I snapped out of it, there was never a sign it was very fluid, as if everything was happening in motion. There was no trigger to let you know that reality had switched off and that you were out of your own mind. That was terrifying because you couldn’t tell if you actually did that when you came to. How do you know that wouldn’t have happened in real life? How do you not know if you’re going to hurt your child and not even know you did it?
The lack of control was truly terrifying.
There was another time that I was driving down the road, and there is a bridge we cross all the time and everything that day was going fine, it was a perfectly fine day, nothing was stressing me out. I drove off the bridge... I felt falling, I felt the hit of the car when it landed, I felt everything. I could hear the metal of the car and the screaming from the back of the car. But again, when ever I opened my eyes, it’s like I blinked and I realized that I was still driving and I wasn’t even coherent and was completely delusional running on auto pilot. I can’t even describe it; it was the most unreal feeling and I had no control over it. I did not know what it was going to happen, there were no signs or triggers to indicate when I could expect these episodes to happen. And these were just the milder hallucinations, they ended up getting so extreme that I was going to hurt her. And that was my biggest fear, that I was going to hurt her.
So, one day I decided, you know what she’s not safe with me and I know I could hurt her without even knowing I did it. So, I made an appointment with a Dr. convinced that they were going to take her but I thought “you know what, if she is safer without me then that’s how it has to be” because I could never live with myself if something happened. So, I made this appointment knowing in my head that they are taking my baby. I sat down and I told him the one story about the coffee cup and this is the least intense one of them all. He said “I’m going to write down that you’re having homicidal thoughts and give you a prescription, have a nice day”. He let me leave with her!! He should have put me in a hospital, I should have been hospitalized with Charlotte. How can you write down that your patient is having homicidal thoughts and not realize that she needs help?
This happened for 5 months after she was born. Hallucinations where I would have someone standing out in my yard waving at me, very friendly and then some not so friendly ones that were all around harming Charlotte. I never told a soul and it kind of passed and then it just got sad and I had some heavy PPD. There was a lot of crying and a LOT of guilt, really unnecessary guilt. Clipping her nails was something I just couldn’t do, I thought I would mess up and cut off her thumb. Diaper rashes I took very personally, like I must be a neglectful mom because how could I not have kept good enough care of changing her bum. Pretty standard PPD symptoms but the superiority stayed well up until the time I had Asher. With Asher I had nothing, I had the blues for a little bit and I started allowing people into my life a little bit and then I had my third, Jaxon and by then I was in a pretty good place.
With my second child I was lucky enough to not have to experience anything more than the baby blues, that is what gave us the confidence to try for a third baby. With the second pregnancy going so smoothly I had hoped that the 3rd pregnancy would be the same way. While my 3rd pregnancy was completely normal, a few months after I gave birth, I started experiencing PPP but this time it was way more violent but its was also different than what I had experienced with my first. With my first I experienced more visual hallucinations while the second time I was having more auditory symptoms and hearing a loving warm voice.
My Psychosis came back with vengeance. I woke up one day and I was like, I am NOT okay and I became extremely delusional, I had no idea what was going on.
His was the scariest one because with Charlotte I would think these awful things, and think I was doing them without any control of what was going on but with Jaxon I was doing it. Never once did I have feelings of wanting to hurt him but I wanted to hurt myself even thought I didn’t actually want to hurt myself. I had this voice in the back of my head that was telling me to do things but it sounded very beautiful. It was a beautiful voice; it was very warm and every time she came into the picture you could feel your body warm up like someone just put a blanket on you. That’s what she would always say “just do this and it’ll feel like a warm blanket” and she would talk and it would be like a song. And before you realized it you were actually doing what she was saying to do but you didn’t know you were doing it and you did not feel anything you just did it. I was highly suicidal but it’s not like I really wanted to die but I felt like I did because of this voice. I got very depressed and I told my husband a few months in “I feel like you need to lock me up in a hospital because I want to die but I don’t know why, and I love my life but I really want to die”.
This voice would tell me to do things that I logically wouldn’t want to do… The ice breaker for me was when my hubby came home one day and I was a mess, I told him “I just need an hour to myself; I’m going to drop you and the kids off at your moms place and go for a drive and take some me time”. So, I went for a drive in my jeep and I parked at the boat launch and that voice came back to me and told me to take the jeep into the river and I actually did. I don’t know how I snapped out of it but I realized that I was in the river with my jeep, I backed out and I took a minute. I had to call my husband Paul because I knew I couldn’t take myself home because I didn’t know when I would switch out of reality again what I would be doing when I did. So, then he already knew what needed to be done and he told me, girl you know what you need to do you have to go to the hospital, you gotta tell a doctor what’s going on. All I thought was, I’m not going to tell a doctor because I’m not crazy, I was so defiant but I realized he was right and decided to go.
The voice I heard would make me want to melt. It wasn’t this dark evil thing, in fact this voice made me feel warm and welcomed and would feel like cuddling under a warm blanket. It was like I would drift off into the back and would just watch everything happen and then you couldn’t stop it. You were there but there was nothing you could do. You were completely restrained and what ever happens, happens and that was really scary. You couldn’t stop thinking about things or blacking out, it would just happen. It was the most terrifying thing to know that I could hurt all of my children or myself and not even know it.
Psychosis is so scary because the reality is, that I could have hurt my kid and not even be aware that I did it. It’s scary because most moms think “if I say anything to anyone, they’ll take my kid”. They start thinking, I am going to be judged, I am going to be analyzed, maybe they are already analyzing me, and they become paranoid as hell when something is going on and no one is talking about it.
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So, I told my doctors and they thought I was just being dramatic but we are going to keep you here for 24 hours since you did try to take your life. They woke me up the next day and I don’t remember that morning but the nurse found me in the bathroom sharpening a toothbrush with a lighter. I have no idea what I was going to do with it but all I remember is her yelling at me “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” and then I realized I was on the bathroom floor and thought, what the hell am I doing, what was I going to do with this make shift shiv? They then sent me in an ambulance to a different hospital and I spent 4 days in a hallway because there were no rooms. I had anxiety attacks and panic attacks, I had been so vulnerable with my feelings because I couldn’t control them and there were so many people who watched me go through that. Rocking and shaking, crying, I was an absolute mess and I had to sit in a bed for 4 days sleeping in a hallway. Then on my daughter’s birthday I got a room and that was the most terrifying thing because I remember not knowing when I was coming out and Paul didn’t think that I was. He had to make that call, he had to decide whether or not I stayed there and he beat himself up a lot for making that decision but he didn’t know what to do because he thought I was going to die. He said to me “I was convinced you were going to kill yourself”. He didn’t make a bad decision I mean he saved my life but that hospital system is messed up man.
You get a psychiatrist assigned to you and you can’t switch your doctor and I never connected with mine. She was very cold and we did not like each other. I received electroshock therapy while I was in there. I would never recommend it! They knock you out and they put electrodes on one or both sides of your head. They started with one for me and then they did both. They will induce a seizure for about 15 to 30 seconds and then repeat it. I can’t honestly say for how long but I want to say like 15 minutes. It’s supposed to alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety and it didn’t work for me at all. They also put me on a bad med schedule that when I got out, I actually became unconscious a few times and ended up in hospital for 3 days because my heart stopped beating properly. Then I got out and it was really hard on our marriage, it was REALLY bad on our marriage, I thought for sure we were getting divorced. Plus, Paul had a hard time trusting me alone with the kids, he didn’t know what I was going to do and I can’t blame him for that either.
I had to get myself out of it so I made myself 3 goals, mental physical and financial goal that were extremely obtainable. For example, my mental goal was overcoming a fear (for me it was spiders), financial was putting away $20 a month and physical actually was when I started getting into running. You give yourself something of a distraction that is super obtainable and once you complete it you feel pretty awesome about yourself. So after I killed 1 spider I was able to kill more of them and became a machine at it and then I did one 5K race that turned into 4 of them and then a 10K race and now climb mountains and now I am going to Everest base camp and I am putting more and more money away. It has helped keep me on a path, not saying it works for everyone it doesn’t work right away but it’s a good health distraction that is obtainable. I went to therapy but it was hard because I found it was cold, and unwelcoming and not conversational and you’re being analyzed.
I realized just in the past year that you don’t have to talk to a therapist but you need to talk to someone. That’s why I started going to church, I am not a religious person and I don’t believe in God but I do believe in spirituality and I do believe in connecting with yourself and that we all have an energy in us. When you go to church you’ll notice, it’s warm and welcoming and when you listen to a pastor talk it is warm and loving and he is there to tell you how to love yourself. So, I would replace the word “God” with myself or I or my family. So, when he said “how can you get closed to God, how can you love God more” I would think “how can I get closer to myself and love myself more”. He once talked about the lies we tell
ourselves and how when you give those lies their 15 minutes of fame they take the spot light in your life but when you block it out and throw a towel over those lies and you replace them with the positive truths you are giving those things the spot light and their 15 minutes of fame and the more often you do that the less power your lies have. After you do get the treatment you still feel this mountain of guilt. “I put my kids through that, I put my husband through that, what do they think of me? Is irreparable? Did I damage a possible good bond with my kids?”
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I had to start changing my life, I had to start making those little changes and I had to stop blaming myself for my PPD and Psychosis because it wasn’t my fault. My kids have seen it, I was pregnant with Jaxon and I felt a panic attack coming on and I went to my happy place ( the shower ) and Asher came into the bathroom and he just sat with me petting my hair while I sat in the shower saying “it’s okay mommy”. He had no idea what was going on but now he has seen me like that and I have to forgive myself for that because it wasn’t my fault. I still feel guilty about it some times, but if I could have been a different person, I would have been I just didn’t have control over it and it’s okay. It’s scary because a lot of people don’t realize that some of these symptoms that don’t seem so serious like the superiority or the excessive amount of crying (that was a huge one) that it’s actually something that could be a sign that you are struggling. If it doesn’t feel right, then its not right. It doesn’t have to be in pamphlets or what a doctor tells you, if you don’t feel okay you’re not okay. It’s fixable but if you feel it you need to, go get help.
There are resources out there but not really enough, because the first thing they go to is “here’s a prescription” rather than educating women and normalizing the realities of what they are going through. You’re not a BAD MOM because you felt that way or had those thoughts, it wasn’t in your control. When I got out of the hospital, I coddled them because I felt so guilty about what I put them through and what they had seen. They got away with what ever they wanted and they were over loved and under disciplined. Paul had to tell me that one day, they are not like that because of what you went through, they are like that because they are kids.
I think that if you are dealing with stuff going on inside your head you should NOT be on Facebook, you are just adding fuel to that fire.
When you are going through it, for example I wanted to hurt her, even though I didn’t really want to hurt her but my brain wanted to. That’s not who you are as a mother, that is just disease with a personality. When ever I slipped out of reality what ever was happening, that was not me who was moving around or talking, that was all the psychosis. You do what ever you got to do to get away from that but it’s not your fault. I felt so bad because how could I ever want to hurt my own flesh and blood why would I want to do the terrible things that came to my brain that I couldn’t stop from happening? That must mean I have to be some dark person, right? Wrong! It took me a while to understand I had to shut off Facebook to heal and get better on my own. A lot of the unrealistic things I put on myself that fueled my disease was a lot of what I was seeing on social media. The last thing you need to hear when you already feel like you’re a superior mom who thinks that they are the best, is to hear that if you do XYZ wrong your child’s not going to develop properly. That just adds to the anxiety of it all. Or seeing perfect pictures of families and trying to keep up with that, its just so unrealistic. I’m sure that 5 minutes before they took that picture, they cleaned their kids face, posed them perfectly and bribed them to smile. Its not real life.
Other things to keep in mind are the symptoms that aren’t in the pamphlet; extreme superiority, not being able to tell what was real and what wasn’t, the anxiety, the constant crying, the general feeling of not being right, hallucinations (auditory or visual), fear in general, some times I couldn’t feel things before I would have an episode, like I would go numb and a sense of loneliness and lost and hopeless, appetite was a big one. I thought that if I ate a cheeseburger when I was pregnant, I would make my daughter fat and that is just ridiculous. Feeling serious guilt, like to the point that I blamed myself as if I had given her cancer when she had a bum rash, like it was pretty extreme. They were always extreme symptoms, there was nothing that was mild. Being scared to talk to people. There really isn’t any reason to be afraid to talk to someone as long as you choose to talk to somebody and be completely honest. If you want to get help and be able to feel some sort of normal again, you have to be honest. No matter how scary it may seem, I can tell you it’s worth it. You also don’t have to look a certain way for these things to happen, you could be single and live in a trailer or be married and live in a big house with lots of money and you can both have depression. It’s a hormone thing not a social economic thing.
A while after my treatment I shared a little bit of my story on social media, because I truly wanted to bring awareness to PPP. I never thought it would happen to me and I could have gotten help a lot sooner if I had just known that I had support. More women reached out to me after I shared a little bit of my story and I didn’t know them and they started telling me their stories and how they didn’t realize they had PPD or potentially Psychosis until they read what I had wrote. So, I knew I had to do something more. When I wanted to start up a support group through parent link for moms suffering from PPMD I was told No and was basically shut down instantly. One lady was eaves dropping and she whispered “I think that’s awesome and will support it, it will just have to all be under me”. What ever we got to do I just want to be a part of it and organize it. Then it just turned into a regular parent link thing and no one talked about Depression or Psychosis or mood disorders or anxiety or even struggling in general as a new mom. While I am glad that the other mothers have some where to go to, I think that mothers like myself suffering from mood disorders need a safe place to go and talk about what is really going on. Imagine how many other women we could save from suicide, long term mental health, marital problems and relationships with their kids if we just had a place to be open!
Not having enough support groups and the lack of support doesn’t help when you are going through something and you’re ready to talk about it. When I started talking, I had those 5 women email me saying “I didn’t even know that was post partum depression and I had it”. If you have a habit that has escalated and it’s extreme for you that is a big sign that something is wrong. They’re not going to take your kids away because you’re not okay, but they’re going to recommend help and if that means you need to go to a hospital then that’s what you got to do. Your children aren’t going to hate you for that, and your husband isn’t going to hate you for that, your life will be different, my marriage is different with Paul, its not the same any more. Even people in your life will tip toe around you and analyze you wondering what you’re thinking and if you’re okay and what they should and shouldn’t say around you but you can’t blame them. Especially when you drive your jeep into a river, you can’t blame them.
So many people didn’t know why I was feeling the way I was feeling so they were so afraid to come up and talk to me because they thought I was a bitch. I didn’t mean to be but I was coming off as a cow and I didn’t even know it. Talking to people was really scary because even having a small talk conversation I felt very uncomfortable, the whole time I didn’t like interacting with people. Psychosis changes you for sure, but it is ultimately your choice to stay that way or to grow from it. I am no where near where I want to be, but I am so far from where I was and that was because I was willing to seek help when things weren’t right.
While I wasn’t able to achieve what I wanted on the first try, I do hope to make some impact in other ways. Which is why I wanted to do this story.
You need to remember that you are not broken, you are not damaged and you CAN get past what ever you are struggling with. If you have a few of the typical symptoms or even ones that you aren’t sure about but still don’t feel right, please seek out some medical help. I understand the resistance, the denial, the feeling of “I am in control of this” but trust me, it is so worth going to see someone if it means getting your life back.
Always remember; “doors open coffee is on and there is a constant flow of coffee, love and a listening ear”
I wanted to thank this Mama from the bottom of my heart from both Mama Bear and I, for sharing and opening up to the vulnerable and real side of Post Partum Psychosis. I know that it wasn’t easy but if this can help even just one Mama then we have done our job.
If you are struggling and want to reach out please feel free to do so as we will pass it on for you.
We love all of you.
-Mama Wolff
** all photos belong to the original owners and we take no credit for anyone elses work**