Dear Natalie
I am so sorry no one has replied to you to support you an this yet .
I think what happens that those who have not experienced PP do not know if you want them replying to you or that you will think their comments valid - and certainly not because they do not want to support you.
I think that the fears you express of getting PP again actually apply to any of us that fear any Post Natal Illness again if they have another baby as either can be very frightening.I hope we can offer you support.
I do not know why we get so few women with PP on this section. Of course you are right it is rarer - but it still happens to quite a few women a year.
Could it be that many try to forget it and do not want to look able over it and when they are actually suffering it they are not able to cope with a forum like this ?
I have been told it is a hard or almost impossible thing to do to hide PP as your thought processes are so disorganised - but I think it does sometimes happen. I think I hid or rather my very bizzaar behavoour went unnoticed
btu I also think this was because during this time I was living alone ( apart form my baby) with no one to see how I was an no one to call the doctor .
You will be with your husband and everyone will be looking out for you as they know what happened to you before - so I do nto think it would be possible for you to hide it is you had PP again.
Inmy case I believe that if I did not have full PP I did have severe Psychotic symptoms for a short while.
This is my story - I have told my story before , even in Caras book Surviving Post Natal Depression By Cara Aiken, Publishers Jessica Kingsley ISBN: 1853028614
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1853028614/verispniwebsi-21?creative=6394&camp=1406&link_code=as1 but I have not before admitted the severity of my symptoms - I would like to talk about what happened to me now
I have never fully explained them before because even many years later I was scared of the consequences - scared of losing my child and it is only now nearly 17 years later I feel safe enough
so I feel everyone else is so brave
I do not know if I had PP but I certainly had psychotic symptoms and I defiantly think there are more overlaps with PNI than is recognised and we should not exclude ourselves from supporting each other, because one has a diagnosis of PP and another or PNI or PND.
I denied for a long time what I now know to be a Psychotic part of my illness - or at what were least psychotic symptoms even if I was not actually sufferign PP.
I will never know now if I had PP or PNI or both as I was never actualy diagnosed with anything despite my being quite loud about some of my symptoms at times, no doctor I saw ever considered me to be ill !!!!!!!
And so until quite recently I did minimise these symptoms to everyone and it is only now I am trying to tell the full story of my expereince.
MyPsychosis Story
For a long time I was ashamed and while I could cope with the stigma I felt existed around PNI/PND I could not cope with the embarrassment of having been for a time as I saw it then truly 'mad' and the potential consequenses.
This will be the first time I have ever gone into detail about it even on here.As the other reason I do not try to describe in detail what happened to me for this terrible few months as it has always seemed inappropriate on a forum for PNI as while PNI is an awful illness to have also and I too had PNI symptoms for most of my illness, to be Psychotic is something different/more scary and I have always been worried that I would either worry women with PNI by adding the fear that they too would get PP to their anxiety..
(as when we have PNI we can get obsessive about getting illnesses or getting worse - i.e. if someone describes something you worry you have it - as this is part of having PNI I did not want to encourage women to think they had something more than PNI when they did not - especially as while I trully thought at the time I was psychotic I do knwo now that psychotic symptoms are not uncommmon with PNI as well as PP)I was also worried that I would be considered to be 'mad' by the women I support who have never had such PP symptoms or that I would lose respect.
I know that sounds arrogant but it was my pride.However I have long got out of feeling like this , but there never was a place on the forum that it seemed appropriate to talk about what I saw as my PP episode.
The last reason I have only hinted that I had PP symptoms like hallucinations etc and not really described the true extent of the 'madness' I felt was because the few I have ever talked to who did had PP have said to me :
- You can not understand it if you have never had it!
- That women with PNI think they know what it is like as they have had a few disturbing symptoms but they really have no idea - so I felt that if if we say we had PP when we were not diagnosed so could not ‘prove’ it somehow taking away something from those who were diagnosed with PP
- having never been diagnosed with PP why would anyone believe I had it and got through it without medication? (but on the other hand why would anyone admit to PP if they did not have it ? I find it very embarrassing/shaming even to talk about my thoughts and behaviour now 16 years later!!
- That is you have PP it is impossible to hide it.
Well I think that this right, that it is pretty much impossible to hide PP.
That on the whole you do not have to fear that you would ever be able to hide it if you did get it with your next baby...
But that there are exceptions that prove the rule and I now wonder if given the right circumstances it is just rarely possible to hide PP and also that it is possible to experience PP or psychotic symptoms for some of your PNI and never be diagnosed even if you do not try to hide it?And I wonder if this was what happened to me??
The circumstances have to there for this to happen as mostly women with PP are not living unsupported with no one around then to notice or care with little contact with anyone as I was!
I do think it is more common to be like some women I know right now who are getting treated because disorganised thinking and hallucinations but not for PP as it is felt their symptoms are something else – but I guess it does not matter what the diagnosis is as long they are bring treated and have help and support?
It is because you mentioned your fear that you may be able to hide it that this has come gushing out of me, because this makes me remember the desperate lengths I want to hide my state of mind
And also because there is now a section for PP, where I feel maybe it is ‘safe’ to tell people about this awful period in my illness.
I guess this is not supportive to you but I felt I wanted to tell you why I can relate to your fear – the fear is why I never had another baby which I really wanted to have Because I think that I may have had PP and I hid it and it was never diagnosed.
I have also supported at least three other woman who have had hallucinations, disorganised thinking and behaviour, manic episodes, even down to really believing - like I did - impossible things and were not diagnosed with PP
Just some being -
That you are a ghost so nothing you do matters, you can do anything ( I had something simular but not quite this , someone I supported had this)
The world has ended but you are still here ( I believed this)
That demon were going to come out to the TV or radio because you were a bad person
You were possessed or haunted (very common)
That you are possessed of special or superhuman powers to read minds or do feats of strength
-----------------------
I will not go on but none of the women who had these thoughts and symptoms above were actually diagnosed with PP often because their symptoms did not come on within weeks of the birth but later....
(and it seems to be commonly believed that you only get PP within a couple of months of the birth) and because they had a very supportive family their behaviour was contained within it – but all got treatment for their symptoms.
The way I got through without diagnosis was helped my 'admitting ' to the part of the illness that I felt was acceptable such as the anxiety, depression some of the 'thoughts' fears for heath etc
and got some treatment from of private counselling which just about helped me to get 'safely' through as PP is thought to be - and probably is - self limiting.
I did this – I did not have medication and only saw a private counsellor who I paid well not to take anything I said outside the room, so as to not ‘give me away’ but this counselling did not happen until after I was practically over the PP.
But having admitted to PNI and in fact shouting it form the rooftops
Admitting to PNI ‘explained ‘ my behaviour to those I met outside the home who I did not relate to in depth who did not know any different and sort of stopped anyone becoming worried as they thought as I had freely admitted I had PNI I must be getting treatment and my behaviour was ‘normal ‘ for someone with PNI
– but my behaviour was worrying enough for my mother and baby group to send a delegation of women to see me to say if I did not stop behaving like this they would throw me out of the group - and yet my behaviour there was just the tip of the iceberg really.
There are probably degrees of PP too.
I do believe now that I may have suffered from PP for about 2 to 6 months which then as I recovered moved on to 'ordinary' PNI for another few years.I have not really explained what happened to me during this time as often it is not relevant to 'ordinary 'PNI/PND
But here is my story of this awlful timeIt has taken me some time to piece together what happened in this time as quite honestly that time is all a blur with a few vivid and disturbing memories
where I thought that the world was going to end or in fact had already ended!!!and I was occupying a world either as a dead person as well and we were all ghosts
or sometimes I beleved I and my daughter were the only ones alive! Funny enough my animals were alive too and this was a great comfort to me.
I was not 'happy' or high as Natalie describes, but very frightened as most of the time I thought I was still alive but everyone else was not except my baby and perhaps my husband (but he was mostly away at sea) and they would 'get' me especially if I admitted to knowing they were all dead - which was another reason I was able to hide my PNI as at my worst I felt I had to hide everything form everyone.
This was when I was at my very worse and thankfully this stage did not last that long - perhaps about 3 months at most and this was quite early, maybe within 10 months of the birth but it started come one on quite soon after the birth, in fact in the hospital when I heard voices and the nurse took no real notice and told me to get soem sleep - but I sort of pushed any awareness of this down until I could not any more.
You mention your fear that you will be able to hide your symptoms and some of this fear is probably based on the fact that if you get it again PP will be more familiar to you and it is much easier to hide something that you have more experience of within reason
(my friend with Bi- Polar with very manic stages thought this for instance, but now we all know that she has these episodes she is not able to hide from her friends or her CPN even the most mild occurrence even when she thinks she is)
I want to explain to you why I was able to hide it as it may help you not to but actually it is because I was able to hide my PP are the reasons why I do not think you need fear this at all.
Without going into details, while I have never suffered psychosis before some earlier experiences in my life made me recognise what was happening to me and understand what I had to do to hide it
- I did not try to hide the fact I had Post Natal Illness - but I did successfully hide the fact that for a time it was psychotic in nature. So on the one hand I was admitting things were not right and trying to get the help and support I needed - but was hiding as if my life depended on this the more disturbing psychotic experiences I had
This was helped by the fact I live in a very isolated place, so while I saw people when I chose to go out, very few ever visited my home at that time and I was mostly alone with my baby and my animals ( these animals included horses, goats cows and chickens which also featured in my PP as they became as people to me and someone to comfort me an look after me,
and my husband goes away to sea for long periods - when I had the PP symptoms for much of the time , over 6 months he was onboard ship in the Falklands, so even he had no idea how ill I really was.When I went out I made sure I was in a fit state to hide it and I also worked 2 days a week for some of this time and to this day I have no idea how I hid my strangness .
As I often acted durring this time really inappropritaly at work - I can tell you stories of my saying completely inappropriate things to colleges in meetings and one famous time when my behaviour was really 'off the wall' one day when we went to a school to negotiate building a new youth centre in the school grounds.
To this day I do not know how I kept my job!
But it did lead later to a capability procedure, but I still kept my job and no one realised how ill I was.
One of the reasons was that when I went back to work in the middle of what I noe consider to be PP or at least psychotic - about 8 months after my baby was born - was I was offered a job that avoided much contact with people.
There was no face to face work for me available with young people as I had been away and others were doing my face to face job.
So I was given a research and development role, both to research and develop guidelines for the personal safety of youth workers working face to face
(Which is why I am able to write guidelines for work on here as I explored all the issues of safety and confidentiality so extensively during this time that they are second nature to me)
This job only required brief contact with any adults and non with children and then only in a very formal way where I had a questionnaire or agenda to get through and their was little room for an small talk etc
I also had anther role in research and development of the new youth club I mention above which also gave me very minimum contact with people except on the phone and in formal meetings.
I spend most of my time at work writing up long and hefty research material /documents and formulating proposed policy from this and in the work on the youth club in writing up feasibility reports based on information from replies to letters I had written and phone calls etc.
I did most of this work in a small office at the end of a corridor where I only saw anyone if I went to the kitchen for a drink and then only briefly or I worked at home --
so I spent my days at home alone with my baby and when I went to work I was mostly on my own.
I only went back to face to face youth work once I was suffering PNI not PP/or psychosis.
Anyway I’d better not go on but I just wanted to say that due to my experience of hiding PP actually I think it would be nearly impossible for you to hide it.
This is because:
That in my case no one was looking for it as they thought my behaviour was explained by my PNI and no one spent enough time with me to realise that it had to be more than this.
Because you have had PP before, everyone form your husband through to your GP, midwives Health Visitor, friends, family will be aware that it is a possibility.
While it is just slightly possible you can hide it if it does not occur to anyone that you have it – I do think it is impossible to hide once it is known to be a possibility
I spent considerable time on my own – if any one had been living with me or even visited to stay over night – I would never have been able to hide it.
I was having serious conversations with chickens for gods sake, throwing every knife and scissors down the mine shaft so there was not a knife in the house to use for anything,.
I never slept, staying up all night dancing to records at high volume – we have no neighbours to disturb - manically ringing help lines and the Samaritans some times
(but this did not get me any help as they are not allowed to tell anyone ,but it did prove to be a place where I could expand my theories as to why I was still alive and they were all dead)
mucking out my stables at 3 in the morning in order to have a talk to my horse with my daughter in a front or back pack often actually sucking at my breast and taking my daughter for walks in a back pack over the fields at 2, 3 or 4 in the morning in the rain and the wind – no wonder she is still a night person
- talking about being dead or about dead people as if it was fact to anyone but as I never saw anyone and I managed to keep off the subject except on too occasions at work when it seemed to escape their notice - these were mostly delivery men or trades men, postman, the farmer in the next farm who just smiled and nodded at anything I said so no one I talked to much cared.
-I will not go on but I am sure that once people are aware that you may get it PP is impossible to hide especially if you live with others and see friends and relatives fairly regularly.
As I said I think there are degrees of PP and I was able to hold it together in public to a degree and also no one had the courage to intervene as believe me I can be quite fierce
but I can not see anyone being fooled had I been diagnosed before or had they had any idea about PP and had seen me in my own home.
Also you have no need to hide it Natalie - so you would probably not try. The bottom line was that I thought I would lose my daughter if anyone realised as my husband was not at home to look after her if I was deemed that I could not
But you know that this will not happen to you as you have had PP and I am sure that this was never an issue with those treating you
It probably was not for me but I was scared it was!
Also I hid it also by putting us a smokescreen of having PNI – your can not do this as anyone concerned with you will be looking for PP not PNI.
Anyway I am aware of really running on and it has been about me a lot of it because there has never really been a section where I could explain what happened to me for a few months.
I truly hope that you will never get PP again or even PNI but I hope we can be here to support you if you do
All the best
Veritee