PPD Isn’t What You Think
The hormonal crash we keep calling depression
Early in my career, I interned everywhere. And I mean everywhere.
There wasn’t a niche I didn’t have my hands in while collecting those treacherous 3,000 hours for licensure.
One such internship was with postpartum mothers.
I HATED IT!
It was a hospital outpatient program for mothers of newborns. They came three to four times a week for three to four hours of group therapy, plus individual therapy about once a week. I covered some of their groups, and I didn’t last long.
I was so uncomfortable that I asked to move to another program in the mental health department. They obliged – thank God.
What did I have such a hard time with?
I sat across from mothers who said they hated being a mom, wished their child were dead, admitted having favorites among their children, or refused to breastfeed because they didn’t want to connect with their baby. They shared all of this while the therapists were expected to show care, comfort, and empathy toward these “mothers.”
I couldn’t do it.
The child was the victim. A hormonal crash may explain what a mother is feeling, but she still chooses what she does with those feelings. A disease does not prevent her from making the basic choice to give love and affection to a helpless child. When a mother directs her own brokenness at her child, I am going to treat the child as the victim and the parent as the perpetrator. Period.
And then they called all of this postpartum depression. They gave it a diagnosis that could be used to excuse the heart-wrenching behavior these mothers expressed.
The diagnosis is bullshit, and these mothers need to get a grip.
Now – before you start attacking me – I understand that moms can feel genuinely depressed after birth. Moods shift, and some moms say and do things so far out of character that even they are stunned by them. I don’t dispute that this happens. In fact, this article explains the real biological phenomenon behind it.
What I reject is the need to pathologize it instead of addressing the root of the problem, which more often than not is a measurable hormonal imbalance (unlike the “chemical imbalance” theory pushed by Psych Inc.).
Let’s start with what we can actually measure, because the field almost never does.
