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What does it feel like to have postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety? What are the symptoms? How do you know when you have it?
I recently wrote a description of the signs of postpartum depression and anxiety in "plain mama English". I felt that many of the descriptions one finds on health sites were written by clinicians, and I wanted to use the kinds of words we hear in our heads when we think about what the hell is happening to us ... not words like hypomania or dysthymia or suicidality or psychomotor agitation. The post ended up being so popular that I thought I'd share it on BlogHer as well.
When you read the lists below, keep in mind a few very important things:
- You may not be experiencing all of the symptoms below or even most of them. Postpartum depression and anxiety are not "one-size-fits-all" illnesses. Your experience may be focused on just a few of the following symptoms and you may not have others at all. For instance, some women with postpartum depression are sad and crying all the time, whereas others don't experience the sadness but are instead very angry and irritable.
- Many people have a feeling like the ones listed below every now and then. For a day, or maybe two. We all have bad days. Postpartum depression and anxiety are not bad days. Women with postpartum depression or anxiety have symptoms like these most or all of the time, for a period of at least 2 weeks, and these symptoms interfere with their ability to function on a daily basis.
- Postpartum depression and anxiety are sometimes "comorbid". This means you can have a bit of both, or all of both. If you have symptoms on both lists, that's not out of the ordinary.
Okay. Here we go.
You may have postpartum depression if you have had a baby within the last 12 months and are experiencing some of these symptoms:
- You feel overwhelmed. Not like "hey, this new mom thing is hard." More like "I can't do this and I'm never going to be able to do this." You feel like you just can't handle being a mother. In fact, you may be wondering whether you should have become a mother in the first place.
- You feel guilty because you believe you should be handling new motherhood better than this. You feel like your baby deserves better. You worry whether your baby can tell that you feel so bad, or that you are crying so much, or that you don't feel the happiness or connection that you thought you would. You may wonder whether your baby would be better off without you.
- You don't feel bonded to your baby. You're not having that mythical mommy bliss that you see on TV or read about in magazines.
- You can't understand why this is happening. You are very confused and scared.
- You feel irritated or angry. You have no patience. Everything annoys you. You feel resentment toward your baby, or your partner, or your friends who don't have babies. You feel out-of-control rage.
- You feel nothing. Emptiness. You are just going through the motions.
- You feel sadness to the depths of your soul. You can't stop crying, even when there's no real reason to be crying.
- You feel hopeless, like this situation will never ever get better. You feel weak and defective. You feel like a failure.
- You can't bring yourself to eat, or perhaps the only thing that makes you feel better is eating.
- You can't sleep when the baby sleeps, nor can you sleep at any other time. Or maybe you can fall asleep, but you wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep no matter how tired you are. Or maybe all you can do is sleep and you can't seem to stay awake to get the most basic things done. Whichever it is, your sleeping is completely screwed up, and it's not just because you have a newborn.
- You can't concentrate. You can't focus. You can't think of the words you want to say. You can't remember what you were supposed to do. You can't make a decision. You feel like you're in a fog.
- You feel disconnected. You feel strangely apart from everyone for some reason, like there's an invisible wall between you and the rest of the world.
- Maybe you're doing everything right. You are exercising. You are taking your vitamins. You have a healthy spirituality. You do yoga. You're thinking "Why can't I just get over this?" You feel like you
