This week is Mental Health Awareness week, so I'm taking this occasion to kick off a new feature here on Postpartum Progress … (drumroll please) … welcome to the Postpartum Progress Poll of the month.
I'm going to be doing a new poll here each month. The purpose of the polls will be to gather "unscientific" data on your experience with postpartum depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, psychosis or the antenatal version of any of these. I want to hear from you on what happened, what your experience was and how you are getting (or already got!) better from these illnesses.
Perhaps this anecdotal information will better help the clinicians out there to provide better help to us. Your answers are anonymous, so please feel comfortable in sharing your experience so that others can learn from it. And you can use the share link at the bottom of the poll to share this with others so they can participate as well.
Without any further ado, here's the poll for October:
Not a word about any of it.
AND, recently a birth educator told me that her clients "don't get that." =O
Please tell me how it is possible that it's not even mentioned casually. Or at least a flyer gets sent home. That's amazing to me.
My educator didn't go into great lengths about it, but she sent us home with this checklist. I looked at that checklist about a thousand times when I didn't know what to do. One sentence about symptoms getting worse and not better is what ultimately got me to say something to my OB. He took it from there, and thank goodness for that.
It wasn't in my birth class. In my postpartum instructions from my midwife there was one line. Contact her immediately if you have "feelings of despair, anxiety, or inability to cope". I read that line a million times, I knew it was talking about ppd, but I didn't feel those things. I felt a lot of other things, but not those Every time I read that line I figured there was nothing she could do to help. I thought I was just messed up.
Since my own experience, I've wanted to print up a bunch of handouts and take them to the hospital myself, for them to include in their useless folder of papers for new moms. They won't let me. "It's not legal"
And ftr, my birthing class didn't breathe a word of anything related to mental illness. Looking back, I wonder how many of us suffered alone. :/
Good Lord, how can this not be a standard thing?
It's in my curriculum, but I feel I don't devote enough time to it. I feel CBEs in general have the same problem I have – short on time, lots of critical content.
I wonder if I should move it up front – do it first before other things. It is easily lost in the shuffle at the end – not that I want it to, but the last week or two of class sometimes get jam-packed – stuff we keep saying, "we'll get to that next week," has to be dealt with at some point.
I took a hypnobirthing class in lieu of a childbirth/pre-natal class. There was no info on PPD, even tho the class was given by a retired midwife.
Theonly mention of ppd was that we were more likely to suffer it, if we had a birth plan and it didn't get followed. It was better not to have a birth plan at all. We receive follow-up visits after birth from a public health nurse in Alberta and she covered it in great detail.
It was mentioned, but very briefly, and no more then a paragraph's worth. It took me two months of misery before I saw a doctor because I just didn't associate my feelings with what I had heard in class. I think the front line of defense against PPD is the doctors after birth. My doctor was hesitant to call what I had PPD because "I wasn't doing stuff like refusing to take showers." Really.
As a childbirth educator I know I gloss over PPD; however, I rarely fail tell them that a deficiency of Omega 3's may occur because human breast milk contains a considerable amount for nervous development. This lack in the mother may be associated with PPD; so the first line of defense, after checking with the doctor, may be increasing one's intake of the essential fatty acids.