“…I am a lifelong sufferer from depressive illness. I have spent many years trying to work out why, and I have come up with many possible explanations. To date the most convincing one I can find is that my mother unwittingly “gave” it to me… through the tragedy of her own postnatal depression.
“My mother’s depression was a closely held secret. In fact, none of my family could remember Jean, my mother, having it. Perhaps there just wasn’t a name for it then. But when she died, more than 30 years after my birth – she killed herself after a depressive episode – and I checked, many years later, on her medical records, there it was in black and white.
“The note comes in July 1956, six months after my birth. It reads: “It would appear that her present relapse has been going on since the birth of her first child.” She was prescribed potassium bromide – an anticonvulsive and sedative, a precursor of modern antidepressants. Later, until 1959, there were prescriptions of phenobarbitone and Largactil. Phenobarbitone is another tranquilliser, Largactil is a “phenothiazine for treating schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, particularly paranoid symptoms”.
“So for the first three years of my life – at least – my mother would have been suffering some form of psychosis. What I was faced with for the first few years of my life was a mother whose emotional spectrum, presumably, was limited, and registered at the dark end.
“I suspect I would not have often looked up to see a delighted, smiling face.”
“I cannot say with certainty how causally tied [my own depressive episodes] are to my experience as a newborn of my mother’s depression. But more than one developmental psychologist has explained to me how profoundly sensitive babies are to their mother’s facial expressions. As I understand it, the unresponsiveness of a depressive mother who cannot mirror her baby can lead to the development of a depressive child. The report rightly recognises this, noting the effect “over decades on their children’s prospects, both in terms of development in the womb and during the crucial early years”.
I can still vividly remember the second visit to my therapist, to whom I had just started telling the whole tangled story, and who had given me the assignment of trying to define any “beliefs” in my FOO. I had come up with “Mom is never wrong” and “Susan is never to blame.”
I voiced those two phrases and then I looked at her and asked, “Are those the same thing?” And she instantly got the biggest, widest smile on her face, a genuine, happy smile of approval.
And I suddenly REALLY wanted to see that again.
Immediately, viscerally, desperately, I wanted – NEEDED – to make her smile at me like that again.
The feeling was so strong, and unexpected, that I immediately did my best to hide it, and I didn’t mention it to her, ever.
In hindsight, it is more accurate to say that, while at the time my THOUGHT was to “make” her smile at me — what I really wanted was simply “for her to smile at me like that again” — without the part about me having to make her do it.
Because of course a baby doesn’t usually have to “do” anything to make a mother smile at her. Sometimes the mother just smiles, I expect. But in my case, I think it shows that I didn’t get that kind of smile — the smile that says, I love you, for no reason other than that you are here — and deep in my mind, it became established that I had to do something to make it happen. I wasn’t going to get it for just being me. Not from her, anyway.
And the pattern continues into the years that follow. Maybe my siblings picked up on her dysfunction, through things as subtle as a smile that didn’t happen, and mirrored HER. Maybe they were trying to gain her acceptance and approval as well, I don’t know. Maybe this is why I have never been able to make my sister laugh.
I do know that I wasn’t ever “really” a part of the family in some eyes, and for years I tried so hard to “make” them smile at me and accept me — when acceptance should have been automatic — but because of my mother’s illness, it wasn’t.
But the one place that I did get those kind of smiles was from my dad. Not quite the same as from a mother, I am sure, but I got something, enough to keep me from being a complete lifelong depressive mess.
In fact, I may have been saved by the factor written about in this article, which was what led me to the one that inspired this post. My guess is that with my birth and my sister’s, my father wasn’t depressed. I heard stories from my mother about how he insisted on giving my sister her first bath. And while at the time of my birth, he may have been under stress from the move and the new job, and confused or even angry about how my mother ran a household, and how she reacted to my birth – I’m going to say he probably wasn’t depressed.
“The report, like many modern social care reports, focuses on the economic cost of such illnesses, which strikes me as odd. It is the human cost that is primary – the agony of mental illness, which is very often avoidable with treatment, being passed from mother to child.
“… For me and thousands of others, the long-term costs are, 50 years later, being pinned to a bed by your own mind unable to think anything but the blackest thoughts… I haven’t suffered postnatal depression – but I have suffered from it.