Fighting Postpartum Depression - Women Who Suffered Postpartum Depression

Written by Louise Kiernan

Two days later, she and Sam brought Sommer home to their red-brick townhouse near the lakefront on the South Side. They bought it because Melanie's mother, who is divorced from her father, lived in a condominium just across 32nd Street. The couple planned to move soon to Georgia, where Sam was going to start a urology practice with an old friend, but wanted to keep the townhouse for visits.

Melanie had been home about a week when her best friend from college, Dana Reed Wise, called from Indiana to see how she was doing. Melanie, usually effervescent, spoke in a monotone.

"I'm fine," Wise remembers her saying. "I'm just tired."

Then, in a voice so quiet it was almost a whisper, she said, "I don't think I like this."

"You don't like what?" Dana asked her.

"Being a mother."

Chronicle of despair

In the brown kraft paper journal her father gave her, Melanie tried to explain what happened.

"One day I wake up pacing then increasingly tired, then disturbed enough to go outside then I feel the thump in my head," she wrote in small, tight handwriting across the bottom of a page.

"My whole life becoming altered."

That was how it must have felt to her, like a blow, like something that jumped out at her from the dark. But, to almost everyone else, the encroachment of her mental illness was so stealthy that they did not see the shadow creeping over Melanie until she was almost engulfed.

She kept changing Sommer's formula, insisting each one made her cry too much. When a friend asked to see the nursery, Melanie refused, saying it wasn't neat enough. She stopped writing thank-you notes.

Sometimes, when Sam was paged at 2 or 3 a.m., he awoke to find Melanie already up, sitting on the edge of the bed, even though Sommer was asleep. Once, when the baby fell off the sofa where she had been sleeping and began screaming, Sam ran to comfort her, while Melanie looked on, seemingly unconcerned.

Sam thought Melanie was just having a hard time adjusting to motherhood. Her aunts Vera Anderson and Grace Alexander, who were helping her with Sommer, decided she had a touch of the "baby blues."

At first, it can be hard to distinguish the normal stress of new motherhood from a mild case of the blues or a more serious mood disorder.

People often don't know what to expect from parenthood. They aren't sure if what they feel is normal. Some of the classic symptoms of depression--lack of sleep, appetite or sex drive--are common experiences for someone trying to care for a newborn.

If women do feel unhappy or anxious they may be reluctant to tell anyone. Everyone is telling them that motherhood should be the most joyful experience of their lives. They worry that someone will try to take away their baby.

During the first week or so after delivery, many women experience the baby blues and find they are unusually weepy, irritable and sensitive. The blues usually resolve themselves within a few weeks.

Carol suspected something wasn't quite right with her daughter but she didn't know what. She urged her to see a doctor but Melanie insisted on waiting for her six-week checkup with her obstetrician.

There wasn't much Carol could do. Women in the United States are not routinely screened for symptoms of a postpartum mood disorder as they are, for example, in Great Britain.

They usually don't see their obstetricians for six weeks after they give birth, and may not see them again for a year after that, a gap that Richard Silver, chairman of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at Evanston Northwestern Hospital, calls "an absolute void in care."

The doctor women do see during the early months of motherhood--their child's pediatrician--often is not trained to recognize symptoms. And many women are afraid to confide in their child's doctor.

By the beginning of April, Carol became worried enough about Melanie that she didn't like to leave her alone. So she brought her daughter and five-week-old granddaughter with her the night that report cards were distributed at Healy Elementary School, where she taught 4th grade.

There they sat, in Carol's classroom, and Melanie just couldn't seem to hold the baby right.

She rocked her. She switched her from side to side. She put her down in the Moses basket, and when she started crying, she picked her back up. She put her back down. Melanie's eyes were vacant.

After that, she started to slip fast. Melanie told her mother the neighbors kept their blinds closed because they knew she was a bad mother and didn't want to look at her. She decided that Sommer hated her.

By the time Melanie went to see her obstetrician on April 6, her mother and aunts were caring for Sommer. Finally, at Melanie's checkup, with her mother by her side, the doctor asked her how she felt.

"Hopeless," she answered.