Post-Partum/SADD Depression: Coming Out

I haven't written much on this blog in the last year. There are a number of reasons for that. I started working in February 2011, and my work provides me with online intellectual time, which used to be part of the function of this blog for me. My wrists can only handle so much computer time, so I generally use that up working and then writing for Mothers of Change.

But the other reason is that I've been struggling, and it's hard to write about in the midst of it. I'm still struggling, but I guess I feel it's time to share. And I'm also at a place of self-validation: while judgment from other people is never fun, it only matters if you allow yourself to feel judged. I'm at a place (I hope) where I am not looking for approval or validation from other people, and I can validate myself. That being said, if you feel inclined to leave a less than supportive comment, don't.

I've been experiencing depression since I was pregnant with Amadeus, about 3 years ago. It started about this time of year, in the dark of winter in Whitehorse, when my belly was getting bigger, Eowyn couldn't walk yet, and I couldn't lift her without straining my belly. I felt trapped. I was a stay at home mom who literally had to stay home all the time. My marriage partner was not as understanding as I could have hoped. I wanted to run away, anywhere. I came up with some ideas for how I could get more freedom--unfortunately, those ideas were not very compatible with Eric's ideas of what he wanted. I felt overwhelmed by motherhood and by my marriage. But I figured that would end once the baby was born.

Three weeks after Amadeus was born I got physically very sick, with a nasty diarrheal bug. I wanted to die, and spent all day crying. I scared myself enough that I went and saw a counsellor. She was not particularly helpful. I went to see a naturopath. She gave me some supplements to help my immune system and build my resources, and I felt better. I felt I was doing something for myself, and whether it was a placebo effect or not, it helped me cope.

I was questioning some dynamics in my marriage, trying to decide what I could live with and what I couldn't. I threatened to leave if some changes weren't made. But we were going to central America, and surely I would feel better with sun and warmth and affordable domestic help all winter. Even if my marriage still had problems, at least we would be having problems in a warm climate rather than a cold one.

The sun and warmth and domestic help were good for me. I did not think about dying. I still felt exhausted, and I tried to rest. Eric and I talked about divorce for the first time. I did not think about dying as an option instead of divorce. I wasn't sure if I loved Eric, but I felt I was finding an inner strength, an ability to think about what I could do for myself and what I could change rather than what I wanted him to change. I told him that I needed to live apart for three months when we got home that summer. He begged me to stay, and said he would change his approach to money and time. He started to change. We got home. I still thought I should live apart. We went to counselling. I realized I loved him. I decided to stay. He spent that summer trying to give me lots of time to myself. We went to a lot of counselling sessions, and worked on some of the things that had come up while I was pregnant. I was still breastfeeding, and Amadeus was a year. I had founded Mothers of Change.

Things were looking up. I knew the winter would probably be hard, but we planned to find someone to live with us and help us. This didn't happen until mid-January. I started seeing an individual counselor late in November or December, as I still felt like running away from it all.

Last year around this time, in the dead of a very cold winter, I started having more intense thoughts of suicide. But that made me feel incredibly guilty about my kids--what kind of life would they have knowing that their mom had committed suicide? So I started having thoughts about putting everyone in the van and driving into a lake. Not a rational plan, as all the lakes are completely frozen in winter in Whitehorse. I felt tortured by winter. And it went on and on and on. I started to work, which was good in one way and very stressful in another. The days got lighter, but I still felt depressed.

I went away by myself for a weekend, and all the trapped feelings from the past few years let loose. I finally had some freedom! I drank too much alcohol and made some decisions that were outside the conventional boundaries of marriage. Then I told Eric that I wanted more of that freedom, and I told him what had happened. We separated for a week, while still living in the same house. I felt relieved, like maybe I was finally going to get away from feeling trapped. And then I realized everything I was losing. So I asked him to take me back, and he did.

Not long after that we had a conversation where I ended up crying and locking myself in the bathroom, looking with fear and fascination at my razor. This scared me enough that I took myself to the hospital, asking for anti-depressant medication. I really tried to avoid medication. I hate medication. But my other coping methods seemed to be failing, we didn't have any help with the kids, the counselling didn't seem to be working...what did I have left to try? At the hospital of course they said they couldn't prescribe anything as they didn't have the ability follow up on me, unless I wanted to check myself in, which I didn't. What was outrageous is that they just let me walk away, without a referral to any kind of psychiatric services or any other help--what if I had gone out and killed myself? I went to my doctor shortly after and got a prescription for Zoloft.

A full time helper arrived a few weeks after I started taking the medication, and then we moved to Vancouver for the summer. I added Wellbutrin to the mix, to try to combat low energy associated with Zoloft. I started feeling better, but it's hard to say if it was the medication or the change in circumstances--I had lots of help with the kids, between our helper and Eric's parents, we were out of Whitehorse and in a big city with lots to do, and it was summer. Eric and I were able to spend time together and have fun, in a way we hadn't done since before we had kids.

When we came back to Whitehorse in the fall, we knew we would go somewhere warm and sunny and low stress for the winter, most likely Maui, as another winter in Whitehorse seemed like a very, very bad idea. Actually, impossible for me. Our helper for the summer went back home to go to university, and a new helper joined us. We all liked her, but she hadn't told us that she had a mental health problem. She found the work that we had agreed on was too much for her, so we cut back one of her days, which meant I had one less day to work, which was stressful for me.

I attended a lecture in Whitehorse by Robert Whitaker, the author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, which touched on a large body of research that indicates that anti-depressants actually lead to chronic depression, as well as leading to more serious mental health problems like bi-polar. I was already thinking about stopping the anti-depressants when we got to Maui, so I weaned off them in October. The research also shows that cardio exercise (I think at least 3x a week) and group therapy are as or more effective than medication for a large majority of the population. There's a long waiting list for group therapy in Whitehorse. I had gone to some Zumba classes in Vancouver, and started going regularly in Whitehorse.

Then our helper's mental health deteriorated, she wasn't sleeping, and she started hearing voices in her head. She went home three weeks before we left for Hawaii. I was feeling very overwhelmed at this point, and struggling to make it through to Hawaii. Thoughts of dying would creep into my head and linger.

We arrived in Hawaii and two new helpers arrived the next day. Eric and I spent a lot of time trying to find a place to live and furniture, so there were stresses associated with that, but at least we were in Hawaii! The weather here is amazing. One of our helpers was not doing the tasks we had agreed on that she would do, and when we would talk about things she would agree, say everything was fine, but then walk away and not do it. Eric found this extremely frustrating--it didn't bother me so much, but I was having a hard time hearing him complain about it. So we asked her to leave. And then our other helper announced she was leaving too. So by December 21 we had no helpers.

I love living in Maui. I have not thought about dying in over a month. The ocean now looks like a great place to swim and snorkel, not drown.But I am still depressed. I still feel very overwhelmed by motherhood. I look after the kids for a few hours and feel completely exhausted. The thought of looking after them by myself for a whole day feels extremely overwhelming, even though I have done it. They're getting older, which means they can spend more time playing independently, so this should be getting easier for me. I don't know how I'm going to move on, or if I ever will.

I find it ironic that my work is all about becoming a mother: pregnancy and birth, when I feel incapable of being the mom I want to be, that I thought I would be, that my kids need me to be. I have a lot more compassion for women who take every intervention in the book during birth--taking anti-depressants felt a lot to me psychologically like taking an epidural during childbirth. I don't know how other parents do it. I really don't. I used to be one of those moms; I loved sleeping with my kids, I planned to stay home and homeschool them, I was attachment parenting. Now, I just want other people to look after my kids. This is in conflict with my desire to have a good relationship with my kids.

I've been going through a shift in my identity: not only am I not the mom I thought I was going to be, which was actually what I had planned my life around, but other things have changed too. I no longer believe in god. I wish there was a goddess; but I just don't know. Trying to be in my body is my current spirituality. I have new realizations about my sexuality, realizations made possible by my movement away from Christianity. I hate to say it because it sounds so cliche, but ascribing to Christianity repressed the fullness of my sexuality, and it is only in the past year that I have really begun to embrace myself.

I hope Nietzche was right, and that nihilism is only a step towards becoming a free spirit and living my life as a work of art. I understand why so many people find what they are looking for in religion: it offers security, comfort, a sense of belonging, a sense of meaning, and it's easier than having to decide your own values as you go along. If you are trying to live life by your own values and it feels like it's not working out, religion can be a great trade-off. But there is a cost. I think the cost is a loss of fullness of self; while Christianity in particular allows the comfort of an unconditionally loving god, you cannot allow yourself to be fully realized while striving against yourself. A certain kind of strength is required to label as 'sinful' anything that your religion says is taboo, and to either live with guilt or try to change. A different kind of strength is required to allow everything that is in yourself to be, as it is, without labels, and to define yourself and your values regardless of what others say.

I may be depressed, but at least there's a whole intellectual field of depression (we call it existentialism, post-modernism etc.) to wallow around in. I am not the first to go through this, and I feel like I am a bit behind the times--after all, these ideas were published and being discussed 100 years ago. And I know there are other moms who have felt the same way as me after having children. The kicker for me is that I planned it all. I planned it. I didn't just stumble into motherhood through lack of birth control or failed birth control. This was all planned. This was going to be my life.

Here's a great resource in plain language that provides symptoms of post-partum depression. (From the website Postpartum Progress.) You do not have to be experiencing all of these to have post-partum depression. The one that's the most surprising is that feeling irritated or angry is a symptom, as this is how I feel. I've never just sat around crying day after day. The ones in red text apply to me.

• You feel overwhelmed.  Not like “hey, this new mom thing is hard.”  More like “I can’t do this and I’m never going to be able to do this.”  You feel like you just can’t handle being a mother.  In fact, you may be wondering whether you should have become a mother in the first place.
• You feel guilty because you believe you should be handling (new) motherhood better than this.  You feel like your baby deserves better.  You worry whether your baby can tell that you feel so bad, or that you are crying so much, or that you don’t feel the happiness or connection that you thought you would.  You may wonder whether your baby would be better off without you.
• You don’t feel bonded to your baby.  You’re not having that mythical mommy bliss that you see on TV or read about in magazines.
• You can’t understand why this is happening.  You are very confused and scared.
• You feel irritated or angry.  You have no patience.  Everything annoys you.  You feel resentment toward your baby, or your partner, or your friends who don’t have babies.  You feel out-of-control rage.
• You feel nothing.  Emptiness and numbness.  You are just going through the motions.
• You feel sadness to the depths of your soul.  You can’t stop crying, even when there’s no real reason to be crying.
• You feel hopeless, like this situation will never ever get better.  You feel weak and defective.  You feel like a failure.
• You can’t bring yourself to eat, or perhaps the only thing that makes you feel better is eating.
• You can’t sleep when the baby sleeps, nor can you sleep at any other time.  Or maybe you can fall asleep, but you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep no matter how tired you are.  Or maybe all you can do is sleep and you can’t seem to stay awake to get the most basic things done.  Whichever it is, your sleeping is completely screwed up and it’s not just because you have a newborn.
• You can’t concentrate.  You can’t focus.  You can’t think of the words you want to say.  You can’t remember what you were supposed to do.  You can’t make a decision.  You feel like you’re in a fog.
• You feel disconnected.  You feel strangely apart from everyone for some reason, like there’s an invisible wall between you and the rest of the world.
• Maybe you’re doing everything right.  You are exercising.  You are taking your vitamins.  You have a healthy spirituality.  You do yoga.  You’re thinking “Why can’t I just get over this?”   You feel like you should be able to snap out of it, but you can’t.
• You might be having thoughts of running away and leaving your family behind.  Or you’ve thought of driving off the road, or taking too many pills, or finding some other way to end this misery.
• You know something is wrong.  You may not know you have a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder, but you know the way you are feeling is NOT right.  You think you’ve “gone crazy”.
• You are afraid that this is your new reality and that you’ve lost the “old you” forever.
• You are afraid that if you reach out for help people will judge you.  Or that your baby will be taken away.