Disclaimer: While I am a therapist, I am not in a position to give you advice and this is based on my own experience. My advice to you: if you are concerned about your mental health, please consult a doctor or mental health professional. I will also add a list of resources at the bottom of this post.
Between 15% to 20% of mothers will experience symptoms of anxiety and/or depression during the postpartum period yet only 10% will seek treatment. Those statistics are from 2013, almost 10 years ago. Now, two years into the pandemic, I wonder what those statistics look like. I was on a perinatal mood and anxiety disorder training last week and one of the topics was pregnancy and postpartum in the pandemic. Listening to the lecture, I realized how desensitized I have become to the pandemic and everything that has happened during it. The way pregnant and postpartum moms were treated during the pandemic was awful. To put it into perspective, at the start of the pandemic, when nothing was known about COVID-19, women gave birth alone with no support partners. Even now, some pregnant women have to attend appointments alone due to COVID restrictions. It’s like we’re setting them up to be anxious and depressed.
I miscarried 3 months into the pandemic. I was expected to have the D&C alone in the hospital. No one was allowed to be with me for pre-op. I was expected to walk in pregnant alone and leave alone, but no longer pregnant. Fast forward almost four months and I am pregnant again but bleeding. For every ultrasound, I went in alone. Every time, I had no idea if my baby was still alive, yet I had to go in alone. Now, I am almost 8 months postpartum and the pandemic is still around although is less severe there are still the repercussions of the pandemic on everyone’s mental health, mine included.
The way this country treats mental health is not okay. The way this country has treated postpartum women is not okay. During pregnancy, women attend anywhere from 8 to 10 (or even more) appointments, yet there is only one postpartum visit and postpartum mood disorders may not present before 6 weeks. I don’t think mine did… or I at least thought that I had it under control.
Now I know that maybe I haven’t had it under control as much as I thought. I can remember crying on the floor of the nursery as Little Man screamed because we were having issues with breastfeeding. I was 6 weeks postpartum at that point. We had had to move him to his nursery at 4 weeks because I wasn’t able to sleep with him next to me. Every noise he made, even if he was sleeping, would cause me to wake up to check on him. However, I continued to struggle with falling asleep and staying asleep 6 months postpartum and ended up having to move the baby monitor to my partner’s side so that I wouldn’t feel as though I needed to watch him breathe to make sure he was okay. There were times in bed that I would have to ask my partner if our son was breathing because he was so still that I couldn’t tell and it was causing me to worry. Yet, I still felt like I was handling things okay.
However, now almost 8 months postpartum, I have decided to return to therapy because I don’t want to feel okay just part of the time. I don’t want to just enjoy being a mom part-time so I am doing this for myself and for my son.
Resources:
Postpartum Support International (https://www.postpartum.net/)
Psychology Today (psychologytoday.com)
MGH Center for Women’s Mental Health (https://womensmentalhealth.org/)