It’s in the news again. Postpartum psychosis (ppp) with a dreadful outcome. I feel caught in a murky riptide of misinformation and hot takes.
I experienced my first episode of ppp 20 years ago. The second just over 16 years ago. I began writing and speaking about it 14 years ago. I’d earnestly hoped writing about my experience would help shift the stigma around this illness.
Things have changed, but I am not convinced much has shifted.
In the beginning, the traditional media almost never resisted the almost pornographic pull of describing the women who succumbed to ppp as demonic.
The way we consume our news and entertainment has evolved or devolved depending on your point of view. Either way, 20 years ago the internet was younger and social media didn’t exist.
Today many more people know about the American woman standing trial for murdering her three children whilst allegedly in the throes of ppp, than they would have 20 years ago.
If you click on just one post the algorithm will vomit everything that is current about ppp, mostly based on this case, into your eyeballs.
Is this a valuable acknowledgement of this rare, devastating condition? And will it reduce some of the stigma it is steeped in?
Yes and no.
The positives are that in the wake of the talk and comments about it, women who have survived ppp have felt safe enough to post about their experiences. They look into the camera, cradling their babies, like a million other new mothers on social media. In doing so they show ppp has many different faces, that it can happen to anyone, and that it is possible to look normal while your thoughts are lying to you.
Plenty of women who have experienced perinatal depression (pnd) and perinatal anxiety (pna) are also voicing their stories of being trapped in the dark, airless corners of motherhood.
Many have fallen through the cracks of a mental health system too.
They say: ‘That could have been me.’
Yet, invariably every ‘That could have been me’ is followed by a powerful caveat: ‘Except for the outcome’, which means ‘That could never be me.’
The incidence, degree of stigma around, and treatment of pnd and pna and ppp is different and conflating them is misleading.
All of these conditions carry a risk of suicide, but the risk of infanticide due to pnd alone is so low it lacks a statistical percentage. For women who experience ppp the risk of infanticide is about 4% if left untreated.
In the context of this court case any woman with lived experience of a perinatal mood disorder has earned the right to step into this discourse or to give it a wide berth.
Beyond lived experience posts and a handful of reputable professional sources, it mostly feels like a circus out there.
Content creators are virtually camping outside that court room in America and are creating a freak show to slaver over, greedy to extract every salacious morsel they can out of a broken woman’s agony.
There are posts from alleged mental health professionals doing a to camera piece on how scary it is to be in a room with a patient with ppp, centring the experience solely on them.
Psychiatrists, other medical professionals, and lawyers pick over the bones of this case, and a woman’s sanity on Instagram. It may be well intentioned, but it is also for the entertainment of their followers.
There are lawyers, nurses, and content creators dressed for a picnic or book club meeting, sometimes including a pet, with a glass of red wine or an iced latte in hand giving us their hot take on this case and the people involved.
They remind me of the women knitting by the guillotine during the French Revolution.
I have been diving in and out of comment sections in the last few days. My exchanges have generally been respectful. They have also thrown up interesting questions. Sharing my thoughts on one iced coffee wielding content creator’s page prompted them to ask me ‘Would you rather we didn’t talk about it at all?’
It is a double-edged sword. Yes, it needs to be discussed. But is all publicity good publicity?
I responded by asking how they would feel if only the worst one-dimensional views about their demographic were being picked over and posted by people who had not lived it?
The years of writing about my experience of early detection and appropriate treatment of ppp, of surviving with my family intact feel like I have been shouting myself hoarse into a widening void.
Survival is boring. Having happy, healthy adult and nearly adult children is boring. Not facing life imprisonment is boring. Good outcomes are not click bait.
And yet for women who have experienced ppp, or who are experiencing it, the most important thing for them to know is not that this condition could end their lives, their children’s lives, that their experience could end up being torn apart by vultures on social media, but that devastating outcomes are not a foregone conclusion of postpartum psychosis.
The most important thing for them to know is that there is hope.
Below is a sample of some of the other writing and speaking I have done about postnatal psychosis:
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/conversations/conversations-anita-link-rpt/9009148
Thought Food 