My daughter was born on a golden Brisbane winter morning. The pregnancy with this first baby had been uneventful. I was well informed and idealistic.
She arrived squalling and sizeable on her due date, after 33 hours of labour by caesarean after my cervix had swelled shut. My relief over her safe arrival was soon swamped by exhaustion and I fell asleep as I was being sutured up.
For the next 4 days in hospital, I slept only an hour or two a day. By day five, when I was due to be discharged, I couldn’t stop crying and had begun to stutter.
I got lucky. My midwife was switched on. She said: ‘You have more going on than the baby blues.’ Relief that what I was experiencing was not normal was replaced by terror when the obstetrician recommended I be admitted to the mother baby unit (mbu) of a private psychiatric hospital half an hour away.
I had no history of mental illness, and this was not how I had envisaged our going home day.
I didn’t sleep in the mbu either, even with sleeping medication, and my baby in the nursery. Even though I had barely slept since the birth.
Two days into my mbu stay I began to laugh inappropriately. Systems only I understood formed in my head. My thoughts raced. On the third night concerned nursing staff questioned me about what was going on. I gave the opposite answers to the truth: ‘No I didn’t have a baby.’
I was diagnosed with postnatal psychosis almost immediately and started on treatment. For me, this meant transferring into the hospital’s special care unit (scu) and starting on high dose anti-psychotic medication. My week-old baby went home with my husband.
Because diagnosis and treatment were rapid, accurate, and appropriate, I was well enough to return to the mother baby unit with my baby within a few days, and well enough to continue recovering at home after another couple of weeks.
While some women experience postnatal psychosis without going on to develop bipolar disorder, this was not my experience. My first episode of postnatal psychosis also heralded the onset of bipolar 1 disorder. That first psychotic episode was followed by a rebound depressive episode for which we were back in the mbu until my baby was four months old.
It took time to recognise and grieve just how abnormal my experience of early motherhood had been. On my daughter’s first birthday I cried for the version of me on the day of her birth who had had no idea how much worse things would get.
I have been privileged to have had access to high quality mental health care from the beginning. It isn’t always easy, but I live with well managed bipolar disorder. My children are 15 and 18 now, emotionally intelligent and mental health literate. Our bonds are strong.
I have no regrets but wish I had known when I first became unwell that my experience of severe mental illness would give me strength, resilience, perspective, and that I would live a full and happy life.
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