It can happen even to someone with their shit together and a loving, supportive husband. Full NPR article here.
Lisa wanted to be the perfect mom. She was ready to be the perfect mom. She and her husband lived in San Francisco, and Lisa had worked as a successful entrepreneur and as a marketing executive for a Silicon Valley tech company. When it came to starting her family, she was organized and ready to go. And that first week after her baby was born, everything was going according to plan. The world was nothing but love.
…”I needed to feed her — that was the most important thing. And my well-being didn’t matter.” She was barely sleeping. Even when she could get a release from what felt like breastfeeding purgatory, she couldn’t relax. As she got more and more exhausted, she started to get confused.
… Lisa says, “It felt like the walls were talking to me.”
… she noticed police helicopters circling over their apartment. “There were snipers on the roof,” she remembers thinking, “and there were spy cams in our bedroom and everyone was watching me. And my cellphone was giving me weird messages.”
Lisa told her husband… she was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. And that’s when her husband told her he was going to drive her to the police station himself.
Her husband, David Abramson, remembers it as one of the worst days of his life. “I’m bringing my wife to the hospital and then checking her into an inpatient unit,” says David, explaining what really happened that day. “It was really, really challenging.”
“That was probably the most heart-wrenching thing, was having to leave her that night with the hospital staff,” he says. “You could see in her eyes and her body language that she was panicked.”
Lisa doesn’t remember any doctors or nurses telling her why she was there or what was going on. But she does remember, about a week into her hospitalization, her husband bringing a printout from online about postpartum psychosis.
“I really was just like, ‘No. I’ve heard of postpartum depression,” she says. “No! I have never heard that there’s postpartum crazy.”
But postpartum psychosis is real. Studies suggest it affects about one or two women out of every thousand that give birth; some doctors now think even more women than that are affected, but go undiagnosed. Without proper treatment, some of those women end up dying — by suicide.
Dhami is an expert on postpartum mental illness, and often treats cases of postpartum psychosis that OB-GYNs mishandled. Based on her clinical experience and observations, she says, a lot of doctors don’t know the early signs of postpartum psychosis; they don’t know that the symptoms wax and wane.
“A lot of times the patient will present very clearly, then at other times, will present with acute confusion and disorganization,” Dhami says.
It’s what happened to Lisa Abramson — feeling like she was of sound mind one moment, and then believing the walls were talking to her in the next.
“This is a symptom that clinicians who are not trained in this field can easily miss,” Dhami says, “Because when they see the patient in their office with the family, they can think that the patient is normal and is probably suffering from sleep deprivation — and discharge them home.”
After Alice gave birth to her son… everything started to spiral.
“There was a definite snap,” she says. “I started yelling about things that didn’t make sense. They made sense to me.”
To her family, it was just an incoherent rage. They called the police and they took Alice to the nearest hospital that had an available bed…
During her three-week stay, she saw her son once, for 20 minutes.
It’s hard for her to admit what it was like coming back to him, after she was discharged.
“It felt like a burden, “Alice says. “It felt like, ‘How am I ever going to do this?’ I held him, I bathed him, and I did all the things — but the connection was not there. I lost time with my son and I’m never going to get it back.”