All posts by Lucy Nichol

Danielle had been a midwife for over four years when she and her partner decided to try for their own family. Sadly, Danielle experienced a miscarriage before she was able to carry to full term, which meant that she was quite anxious while carrying her daughter. However, other than the worries and her morning sickness, Danielle’s pregnancy was relatively trouble free.

The birth, however, wasn’t the low lights, birthing pool experience that Danielle had hoped for and she had to undergo an emergency C-section after her induced labour didn’t go to plan. Add to that problems with an ineffective epidural, a haemorrhage and the fact that her baby became stuck resulted in a very painful and traumatic birth.

When Danielle got into the post op area she knew something wasn’t right but couldn’t put her finger on it. She felt emotionally and physically battered by the whole experience, and, instead of focusing on her baby, all she could talk about to her family, friends and colleagues was the trauma of the birth itself.

On day three, Danielle and her new baby daughter were able to go home which was both an anxious and an incredibly exciting time. As she walked in through the door and saw her pet husky, she immediately felt frightened that her beloved pet was evil and wondered why she was staring at her baby. She asked for her dog to be locked in another room.

As the days went by and visitors dropped in, Danielle could only talk of her traumatic birth and was able to focus on little else. She became unable to sleep and would stay awake all night for the feeds, rather than setting her alarm. Danielle also became obsessed with expressing milk however, because her mind was racing and she wasn’t eating or sleeping, she became unable to supply the breast milk her baby needed.

As the days wore on, Danielle became argumentative with her partner and everything became a huge issue. At this point, she convinced herself that she was suffering from postnatal depression. However, she also became convinced that her partner was suffering from post-traumatic stress too and was preoccupied with finding him some help.

On day fourteen, after more arguments, Danielle told her partner to pack his bags, convinced that he was the problem. With this behaviour being so out of character, Danielle’s partner confided in both his mum and Danielle’s mum and both came to speak with her. On arrival, they found Danielle had locked all the doors and shut all the blinds and was unwilling to speak to anyone, getting angry and aggressive.

On that night, a GP visited Danielle and made her an appointment for a psychiatric assessment the following morning. At the appointment, Danielle couldn’t even read the papers in front of her that she was asked to sign - all the words had become blurry and back to front. At this stage she was sectioned.

While on the ward, Danielle had even forgotten that she’d given birth, having to check her caesarean scar to see if it had really happened. She became paranoid and was reluctant to take the prescribed drugs, thinking that the doctors and nurses were trying to kill her.

After a visit from her mum and her partner she eventually took her meds and slept for twenty hours straight. On waking, Danielle still felt incredibly confused, but she could feel parts of her old self coming back. She was given a leaflet on postpartum psychosis and was shocked that this thing she had learnt about during her career had actually happened to her.

Once the antipsychotics started to take effect, Danielle was moved to a mother and baby unit (MBU) to be reunited with her daughter. The MBU was brilliant and Danielle was able to meet other mothers going through the same thing and get the dedicated support she so needed. However, the MBU was three and a half hours away from home so it was a struggle for family to visit.

After less than ten nights in the MBU, Danielle was ready to go home. This is when the postnatal depression (PND) kicked in. Danielle says that the PND was so much worse than the psychosis because, with the psychosis, you don’t really understand how you feel or what is happening. She spent weeks continuing with her antipsychotic medication as well as antidepressants, but the depression persisted for around eight months and she really struggled. However, after eight challenging months, Danielle felt ready to return to work and started to feel like herself again.

Today, Danielle is feeling happy and confident as a mum and midwife and has a much greater understanding of postpartum psychosis having been there herself. She hopes to raise awareness to help other new mums who might be experiencing similar challenges.

Charlotte had never heard of postpartum psychosis (PP) when she gave birth to her first child in 2012. However, it was when she was still in labour that she first experienced the hallucinations, delusions and intense anxiety that comes with PP. Unfortunately, due to a lack of awareness at the time, it was wrongly assumed that Charlotte was suffering from PND (postnatal depression) and it would be another six months until the real nature of her illness was ever confirmed.

Having lived with extreme anxiety disorders, an eating disorder and alcoholism from a young age, mental health had always been of concern. So when Charlotte fell pregnant with her first child, her midwife referred her to the Cardiff perinatal mental health team – just to be safe. She was able to speak at length with a psychiatrist about the risks and was assured that, with Cardiff’s MBU in operation, there was a clear pathway to care should she need it.

Funding cuts, however, soon took away this much-needed safety net resulting in an extensive period of acute mental ill health for Charlotte.

25 years of age and overjoyed to be pregnant, Charlotte was looking forward to welcoming her first child into the world. However, things became difficult after 33 hours of labour, when Charlotte began hallucinating. She was convinced that there were men in white coats walking in and out of the labour suite, but when Charlotte asked her husband and midwife why they were there, they had to tell her that there was nobody there. The midwife assumed that Charlotte’s hallucinations were the result of confusion from extreme tiredness and the gas and air she was given.

The labour continued and was long and traumatic. Charlotte had had little to no sleep for a week and suffered a postpartum haemorrhage – further adding to her distress. Her husband was sent home three hours after the baby was born, and she was transferred to the maternity ward.

Left feeling alone and scared, coping with frightening delusions and hallucinations as well as learning how to hold and feed a baby for the first time, Charlotte was plunged into a world of paranoia and fear. Her head spinning, all she could hear was whispering coming from the cubicles around her, as if everybody was talking about her behind her back. Even though her baby was crying, she desperately wanted to run away and, at one point, sat on the wall outside of the hospital feeling detached from reality. Charlotte even believed at this point that she might be dead and looking down on herself from above.

The next morning, Charlotte was too terrified to tell her psychiatrist about the whispers and the hallucinations. She was already paranoid that people were trying to take her baby away, and so believed that confiding in them about the strange sensations she was experiencing would only strengthen their case for removing her child.

Instead, Charlotte assured her psychiatrist that all was well and that she just wanted to get home to sleep.

As the weeks went by, however, Charlotte’s mental health got much worse and her husband took her to see the doctor. Charlotte was still too afraid to tell anyone about the voices and whispers – as well as the new delusions she was experiencing – where she believed that her husband was drugging her. The doctors diagnosed her with PND.

At this point, Charlotte was seeing and hearing things that weren’t real on a daily basis – whether it was something small like a mouse running across the floor, or something big and traumatic, like her husband jumping through a closed window. Eventually, six months after giving birth, the mental health crisis team were called and came to see Charlotte in her home. She had been talking to the radio and her husband had witnessed this and been really taken aback – it was the first time he had seen first hand the extent of Charlotte’s symptoms. She was immediately diagnosed with PP.

But just when she needed the MBU in Cardiff for emergency care, she discovered it was due to close. Other than travelling hundreds of miles away from home, a general adult psychiatric ward was the only option for inpatient treatment. However, because Charlotte was unable to take her baby with her, and because she was already so terrified that people were trying to take her baby away from her, it simply would have made matters ten times worse.

Instead, Charlotte received home treatment which involved a combination of medications and lots of support from her husband, who had to dedicate his time to looking after her.

Eventually, Charlotte found herself responding positively to the treatment and, when her baby turned one, she was back to full health. But knowing what she knows now, that other women experiencing PP can often recover within weeks when they have access to specialist care at an MBU, Charlotte is determined to raise awareness and campaign for more of these services so that other mums don’t have to endure the year-long illness like she did.

Charlotte believes that, had the MBU been available to her in 2012, she would have If the MBU had been available to her in 2012, Charlotte

Knowing that increased awareness and having the right specialist support services close by would have given her back the year of her life that was lost to psychosis, Charlotte began campaigning to stop other mums having to go through what she did.

When I was separated from my baby daughter for hospital treatment I became convinced that something terrible had happened to her. For a time, I even believed that she might have died. For a woman experiencing postpartum psychosis (PP), the trauma, separation and anxiety was unbearable.

You have these ideas of starting family life in a bubble of happiness. Of course, we know that labour is painful and that sleepless nights are to be expected. But my experience was wildly different to what I was expecting.

Immediately following the birth of my gorgeous baby girl, Ella, was one of the most terrifying, inescapable nightmares I could ever have imagined. I was in such utter pain and despair day after day that I constantly thought of walking into the sea near our home in North Wales.

I’d had a relatively smooth pregnancy – nothing out of the ordinary. However, I was a week overdue and I was showing some signs of preeclampsia, so I was induced. The labour was difficult and Ella’s heart rate kept dropping and she was in distress, so eventually, she was born by Caesarean Section. But as I came round from the anaesthetic my confusion was off the scale.

I didn’t understand what was happening and, as such, I had a brain scan for a suspected stroke, which thankfully came back negative. I was simultaneously pleading with the nurses to sit with me as I was so scared about what was happening, and paranoid that they were talking about me. A few days later I got up to go to the toilet and collapsed, sobbing and refusing to get up.

In my mind, I believed that I'd died.

Everything was frightening and intense. The sound of babies crying was deafening, the whirr of the air conditioning unit overwhelmed me and the canteen trolleys sounded like trains crashing through the ward; lights being switched on were like explosions and I could see shadows on the wall. I saw a midwife take Ella away, and immediately believed she was being resuscitated because something awful had happened or perhaps I'd harmed her.

All throughout, I remained convinced that I'd hurt my baby and that I had died and was now living in the 'after life', a kind of hell. The nurses brought Ella to see me, to reassure me she was ok, but I was convinced they'd swapped her and that she really wasn’t OK.

I now know that I was having a psychotic episode.

My husband, Jamie, was informed that I was suffering from PP and I was transferred to a general psychiatric ward. I was prescribed anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety medication. I was also separated from my baby which made me constantly anxious and reinforced some of the beliefs I had about her being swapped or coming to harm.

A week later, I had a review with the consultant and I told him things were better than they were just to be allowed out of there. A home treatment team was arranged to visit me every day but things didn't improve much. I'd manage to help meet Ella's basic needs, change and feed her. But I was going through the motions.

I then hit an extreme low, a bleak depression punctuated with psychotic symptoms.

Ten months after coming home, I told Jamie that I couldn't go on. My husband, who'd done so much to help me, was distraught. Determined to help, Jamie did a literature review on PP treatments and  electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) came up a lot. We found and asked to be referred to a world-renowned expert in PP. He agreed that ECT might help me.

There’s a lot of stigma around ECT – and you immediately think it's a barbaric, horrible treatment, involving being strapped to a chair and electrocuted. To be fair, it is fairly dramatic - you're anaesthetised and electrical currents are passed through your brain to trigger a seizure. But for someone like me, who was so acutely and chronically unwell, it was something that really helped.

Half way through the ten sessions, there was a shift in my thinking. Something terrible was being lifted from me. I believe ECT, along with the amazing peer support I received from other women who had experienced what I had, saved my life.

Gradually, I've grown stronger and my bond with Ella has become stronger too. It's sad to think about what I've missed out on but now I look at her and get excited that everything's ok and that we're here - happy and healthy.

Once you've suffered from PP there's a high chance of it recurring with subsequent pregnancies. It's a very personal choice, but even if there was only a slight risk of going through that again, for us, it's just not worth it.

But it's very important to me to give hope to others going through the horrors of PP. You'll be convinced it will never, ever end. I was convinced too. But today, I am recovered and living a happy and fulfilling life.