Baby blues or something darker

I’ve heard from others that sometimes postnatal depression hits you like a bus – from the day you give birth you cannot stop crying, you throw things or completely withdraw and you feel detached from your baby.

I know from my own life that sometimes postnatal depression doesn’t hit you like a bus – it just kind of creeps up on you.

You can take care of the baby, you’re affectionate and loving towards your baby, but you feel like your head’s in a cloud… and that cloud that you initially think is just the baby blues, just drags on and on and on… and before you know it, you have become someone very anxious, very easily irritable and very sleepy.  You have become someone who doesn’t feel like you. Someone who’s constantly scared of something bad happening to your children. Someone who gets annoyed at the smallest of things. Someone who can be uncharacteristically unkind to those around you.

For those whom PND doesn’t hit like a bus, life can be a very frustrating fog for a long time, with many ups as well as downs, before the realisation comes that this is not normal. That this is not you. That this is not who you want to be for the rest of your life.

So how do you know when your baby blues has dragged on to become something more serious? My list of “clues” is something like this:

• You want to sleep a lot
• You think about the birth a lot and cry a lot… sometimes on your own… sometimes in public…
• Little things irritate you a LOT
• You often loose your temper (see point above) even though you never used to before
• You want to sleep a lot
• Thinking about household chores gives you panic attacks and you’d rather just sleep
• Mess really annoys you but you have no energy to clean it up… you’d rather just sleep
• You make mental lists every morning to help you cope with the day. Example: “First I will get out of bed, then I will brush my teeth, then I will have a shower, then I will get dressed, then I will have breakfast, then I will prepare lunches, etc. etc. etc.”
• You want to sleep a lot
• You don’t want to talk about your birth experience because you know you’re going to cry
• You throw tantrums that are so alien to you that they feel like out of body experiences
• You have felt some or all of the above for longer than a couple of months… maybe even for longer than a year…
• You try to regain control by a) exercising a lot and or b) trying to eat really healthy but it doesn’t cure to your anxiety/moodiness/exhaustion
• You feel so helpless at not being in control of your emotions and actions that you’d just rather sleep

It’s actually weird finally writing about this even though I have been dancing around this topic for a long time. But here it is. My list. My experience.

If you have PND, your list might be very different from mine. I don’t know. I haven’t asked you. I’m sorry that I haven’t.  Talking about it is the first step towards being healed.

Footnote: I was officially diagnosed over a year ago. Today I am fine. Helping me are my wonderful husband and mother and a small daily dose of Citalopram.