Our approach to discussing mental health in the western world is beyond frustrating; it is confusing! We need to stop generalizing terms that have significant meaning. For postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, or other postpartum mental illnesses, we cannot just call it “postpartum”. We too easily dismiss why we have these issues, but I think first and foremost, we need to start addressing them correctly, literally. Too many people don’t know there is a difference between a specific chapter in time in a woman's life, and a problem she may be facing.
We have this phenomenon of women getting very down in the dumps after having a baby, and we are told this is very common. And it makes sense. Your hormones are doing unfamiliar things, your sleep is drastically impacted, and your responsibilities are different now. There's definitely an abundance of reasons for you to be going through emotional challenges, so I absolutely understand and respect that.
My problem with the issue is people just generalize, and call it all “postpartum”, regardless of if they are referring to mood swings or psychosis. They don't add a crucial detail, if they mean to acknowledge a problem. They just say “postpartum” as if the term means it is normal and expected to get depressed after you have a baby. (Something being common does not equate to it being normal, just to be clear.) How are we ever supposed to resolve these issues that so many women go through if we can't even use the right terminology for it?
Women need to be more accurate in their description of what they're going through when they are postpartum. You can be postpartum and not have any problems going on. You can be postpartum and have issues with your body, with your baby not responding the way you want, and so on, and those factors cause you some struggling. There's a lot that can happen postpartum, but when people generalize postpartum-illness as simply “postpartum,” it is incredibly misleading for what this phase of life is supposed to be about.
So as a whole, we need to catch this now so that women stop going into this phase - this wonderful, beautiful, mysterious, magical phase - assuming or expecting to become unhappy or miserable or out of control.
I don't know how to put it more simply than this: we need to stop generalizing the word “postpartum” as a negative. If you have postpartum depression or anxiety, you need to speak it as such. You can't just say, “I'm postpartum,” or “I have postpartum.” That isn't a diagnosis!
Being postpartum is a state of your body, since you just created and birthed a new human. Again, there are a lot of changes taking place, physically, mentally and emotionally, and this stage is often considered to be about a year long.
It's a chapter.
It is a marker in time.
It is not a symptom.
It is not a disease.
It is not inherently a problem.
It is a time period.
So when you have mental illness in your postpartum phase, that needs to be magnified or accentuated. Being postpartum is just a factor in why you're depressed or anxious, or perhaps going through a psychosis in the worst cases.
But most of the time when you have a baby, you are elated! You are blissful! You are now adjusting to existing being beyond in love with your new companion.
It's the most spiritually beautiful part of your life that you can hopefully find presence and support through.
And that's what we need to focus on - getting mothers the assistance that they need, not just emotionally, but physically as well, both with their bodies and in their homes. The sole priority while postpartum is to bond with and care for your baby. So when you're physically burdened, then your emotional health is more easily drained, and it could spiral out.
I understand how and why it happens when people do get depression and anxiety after bringing a little miracle into the world. And I certainly know plenty of women who have postpartum depression or anxiety. Perhaps something to hypothesize is whether the women who suffer had trauma in their lives when they were children, too. It seems plausible that women who were not cared for with the proper amount of nurturing as children themselves end up resurfacing some of those pains when they become mothers now.
We could greatly improve mental health outcomes for the mother-baby relationship by addressing whether someone has had a history of mental illness, especially related to past traumas. We need to not dismiss those as circumstances in causing their postpartum depression, etc., rather than implying that babies are the burden and some women just can't handle it.
In all areas of life, but most importantly this one, we need more community. We need more openness, more understanding and more appreciation for what women go through after they have their babies, so that they feel that they're not alone in this very common (most innate, natural) situation of bringing new life into the world.
We need to be devoted to helping break these cycles so that the new babies aren't traumatized by their own depressed mothers, and these women actually get the help that they need.
In full transparency, I am absolutely not on the side of pharmaceutical interventions… although I don’t want to dismiss the cases where people are truly helped by them, and that's great for their own wellbeing. I just don't believe that psychiatric drugs are a long-term or overarching solution whatsoever. Looking at the societal anecdotes, and studies around these pharmaceuticals, antipsychotic medications have the potential to cause psychosis and other social and bodily harms.
Part of what the pharmaceutical industry does is create these conditions, these diagnoses, and then they make formulations to “solve” them, or cure them, or mitigate them…When in actuality, these chemical concoctions can often exacerbate your symptoms or give you new side effects, new problems. (They list them out in the literature, and you are informed on the commercials!!) So generally speaking, I am not in favor of any type of pharmaceutical intervention when somebody is going through a mental illness crisis.
I think a lot of mental illness has to do with environmental and lifestyle factors rather than a lack of certain petrochemicals in their brain. Obviously, this is a very controversial issue. But how many mentally ill people who are given pharmaceuticals then end up harming other people? We don’t have statistics on this, but it seems prevalent enough to acknowledge that many of the people who cause harm to others, if they have a history of mental illness and they “sought treatment” for their illness, were prescribed drugs that made their problems worse. It didn't help their problems get better.
CLEARLY, this is not the case for every person who's ever had mental illness and ever been prescribed drugs. There are plenty of people who take these antipsychotic pharmaceuticals and don't hurt anybody! But a lot of times now, the people who actually do damage to (especially) their family, or their loved ones, they're on drugs. Prescribed, legal drugs! And we do not talk about this enough, if at all, in this culture. And that is a much bigger issue that we need to resolve, instead of just using vague terms, or blaming others, because that just perpetuates the problems.
As a new mother myself, it has been very strange to be in this baby bubble while also hearing this giant, absurd, nationally-recognized case of a mother killing her three children. It has been suspiciously hyped up across all media, and shockingly opening up a mob of fans for this heartbreaking atrocity.
I understand supporting women who need help. We should always do that WHEN THEY NEED IT. But these crowds of support or indecisiveness seem to be glorifying her psychosis. It's more than acknowledging that she had mental illness. I just cannot wrap my head around being “on her side” whatsoever.
My baby is still itty bitty. He can't speak. He can't do very much at all yet. So he's very needy and very dependent. My whole existence is really wrapped around just taking care of him, for the most part, and will still be for quite some time. He's not even three months old, so I don't personally know what it's like as they get older. And I don't know what it's like having more than one. But I have seen countless women raise families and not go crazy and not want to harm their children. So I know that that is the most unfortunate and awful situation, and those babies obviously did not deserve to get their lives taken away, especially so gruesomely by the most heinous perpetrator possible.
So I just cannot fathom why anybody would be on her side in this, other than by being so distorted in their understanding of mental illness, and the fact that there are solutions available other than being (over-)prescribed antipsychotics...
There's no reason that we as a society should just brush it off as “postpartum”. There is a possibility that the mothers who do commit infanticide are literally just evil, or it is possible to have a psychotic break. But in the end, those women don't deserve a life of freedom because her children are not here. Having a moment of lack of control over your insanity should not grant you immunity from the tragedy you inflict.
It's just hard for me to imagine wanting to live if my child was gone. So I don't understand anyone desiring lesser punishment for such a behavior, or the people in support of being accommodating to this type of killing.
But let’s talk about how our system failed in a situation like the Clancy case. Our system revolves around prescribing drugs. The system is broken overall, because its focus is to sell pills rather than heal people. That's where our culture has failed: by allowing our society to rely on pharmaceuticals. We’ve been given this illusion that drugs solve problems, but all too often, they just create more and more!
But again, we first need to stop generalizing mental illness in new mothers as “postpartum,” and we need to address it as what it actually is: mental illness. Depression, anxiety, psychosis, whatever. Whatever the specifics are, just start by being accurate and descriptive. Postpartum is just the time period. So stop calling a spectrum of illness “postpartum.”
And we need to stop just turning to drugs for all of our issues, and actually figure out why we're sick and broken to begin with, so that we can get better and stop hurting ourselves and each other. The solutions involve community, not being poisoned in your environment (home AND the outside world) through chemicals that disrupt your internal systems, having a reverent relationship with nature, and finding purpose in your existence.
We can regenerate our societal views on mental illnesses by first addressing them as illness. People do the same thing with the term “mental health” when they really mean “mental illness”... So let’s start by speaking truth to this topic, so that our peers can think thoroughly through the experiences, and we can view people’s problems holistically in order to find lasting, powerful solutions that actually improve individuals’ lives AND humanity overall.