Postpartum psychosis: Affected parents speak out

Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2012-08-23 01:46

Article here. Excerpt:

'Women are more at risk of severe mental illness after giving birth than at any other time in their lives.

In the worst cases it can lead to postpartum psychosis, also known as puerperal psychosis, a mental illness which affects one in 500 new mothers and can result in suicide or them killing their baby.

BBC Newsnight has spoken to people affected by this devastating but poorly understood condition, which often goes undetected because doctors and midwives can fail to recognise the symptoms.
...

"I put my hand around his tiny neck, not yet strong enough to hold up his own head, and began to squeeze. I wasn't trying to harm him. I knew I mustn't do that, but I wanted to know if I was capable of it."

Jo knew something was badly wrong, but she was too scared to seek help because she thought her children would be taken away from her.

Without treatment she became sicker and began planning how to kill both herself and her two young sons.'

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Comments

Just criminally ill, that's all. Do you suppose that if men had a similar such problem, occasionally where they sort of black out and kill their newborn kids or have irresistible homicidal urges toward them, that sympathetic newspaper articles like this one would get written about them?

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Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2012-08-23 01:47

that results in the woman aborting her child...or aborting several children over several years? surely a woman must be considered mentally ill if she kills her kids time and time again.

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Submitted by oregon dad on Tue, 2012-08-28 15:32