This article references suicide attempts, suicidal thoughts and postpartum psychosis.
I’m looking at my reflection in the mirror. There are red stains around my mouth and in between my teeth. Did I really eat my baby? My heart is racing. But then I turn around and see my newborn daughter, Rosalie, angelic and asleep in her crib behind me. I look down at the plum core in my trembling hand. I’ve just left Thumbswood Mother and Baby Unit – a specialist service for women experiencing significant mental health difficulties during pregnancy – and things are only starting to make sense again.
New motherhood is meant to be a magical time, all fluffy towels and cuddles, but the reality is often different. We had an easy pregnancy despite the ‘morning’ (all day round) sickness, and I’d been expecting a low-risk birth. I’ve been with my husband Alex for 10 years, and we conceived naturally with relative ease. I’d been planning a hippy dippy child birth and had an elaborate birth plan with NEOM scented candles and oils, a lengthy playlist and plans for a water birth. I knew motherhood wouldn’t be easy and had already swotted up on pregnancy and motherhood books, focusing on raising a little feminist. As my day job is PR & Media manager at domestic abuse charity Refuge, the safety and well-being of women and girls is sort of my specialist subject.
However, for me, new motherhood was a turbulent time as six weeks into the new gig, I got hit with a debilitating illness called ‘postpartum psychosis’, a serious mental health condition which affects 1 in 1000 new mums. Put simply, my post-baby hormones had sent me completely off my rocker.
I’d arrived at the mother and baby unit (or MBU as they’re known) in a complete trance. Two adults – my husband and his mother – were required to escort me there in case I tried to escape on the way. My hair was soaking wet from the bath I’d tried to drown myself in earlier that afternoon.
I was trapped in a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake up. I hadn’t slept properly since before Rosalie was born, a traumatic birth that ended up being an emergency cesarean due to preeclampsia. For a week, I felt trapped in an escape room, and I was convinced that I needed to perform rituals around the house and garden to try to get out. I was exclusively breastfeeding and would find myself feeling wired after the night feeds, so I’d stay up and rearrange the house. Amidst my new mum stress, I hadn’t quite realised that I had entered a state of full-blown insomnia.
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The hallucinations started pretty soon after getting out of the hospital post-birth. At one point my baby morphed into W1A actor Jason Watkins, the next I thought she had been replaced with a pillow, and then when she was sound asleep in her next-to-me cot, I saw her body crushed on my bedsheets.
My husband didn’t notice anything at first as I muttered things like”‘Don’t you think our light really looks like Rozzy?” at 3 am, but I soon deteriorated. “You’ve grown up so fast”, I mumbled to my husband, convinced he was an adult version of our daughter. I’d taken the well-meaning “She really looks just like her Dad” comments literally. Then I became convinced our house was on fire.
My ‘new mum’ hormones that were meant to protect our newborn instead had me in overdrive, and I was constantly on edge, thinking everything was an emergency. I couldn’t stop smelling gas. Then I realised I had no idea what date it was, not even the year. I would get in the bath with my watch on, convinced time was hurtling forwards and then backwards. I genuinely thought I could time-travel. The reality is that new motherhood and maternity leave are crazy periods where time seems to move differently, but my illness had taken this to new extremes.
It was a Saturday night when the ambulance was called. Ironically, I’d been watching Casualty and had believed that everything happening on the show was actually about my life. I changed the channel, and it happened again; nightmare versions of mine and Rosalie’s lives were playing out on a celebrity special of The Weakest Link.
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Two paramedics turned up after my terrified – not to mention, exhausted – husband called 999. “You’ve been packing and unpacking a lot, haven’t you?” I thought I heard the female paramedic say sympathetically, as her male counterpart ordered me to get my things together to get in the ambulance with him. “I only want to speak to the female paramedic”, I said, my feminism now projecting to outright rudeness in the midst of my mania.
Let me DINK in peace.
Hospital signs jumped out at me as I arrived in A&E, and I started chanting “Don’t fall, call”; an NHS slogan that I’d believed was about me falling down the stairs with my daughter – something that never actually happened. I muttered the date over and over, getting increasingly frustrated with myself when I couldn’t remember it.
I was given anti-psychotics and narrowly avoided being sectioned after agreeing to go into the mother and baby unit, where I began rebuilding my sanity with my daughter right there with me. It’s been slow progress, but I soon realised I didn’t eat my daughter, I didn’t burn the house down, and I didn’t time-travel to 2077. I was just unwell.
A month-long stay at a psychiatric unit was not how I envisioned starting my maternity leave. I’d not had any history of mental illness prior to my pregnancy, but psychosis doesn’t discriminate.
I wrote this to start making sense of what happened to me and to raise awareness of a relatively unknown condition. I was lucky I had a close-knit support system that quickly spotted I was unwell. If any of your friends are new mums, please do check in with them. They might not be having a full-blown psychotic break, but they will appreciate the support during what can be an isolating and maddening time.
For more information, support, and resources about postpartum psychosis, visit Action on Postpartum Psychosis. If you, your partner or family think that you have symptoms of postpartum psychosis, it's recommended to book a same-day appointment with your GP. You can find your local GP here.
“No mother should be left behind to suffer in silence.”
