Losing my mind and my child

[alexsdad]

My fiance and I are due to have a baby in December, yesterday she told me that she wants to give the baby up for adoption. I am not truely into this idea allthough I know that she had made up her mind. She says that she has no feelings for the baby and that we should just give it up. She had ppd bad with her daughter that she never got treated. I have been reading much on line about it and ante-natal depression and she actually has many of the symptoms of it how to I convince her to talk to the doctor about this. Has anyone else been thru this or is there anywhere I can research this more.

[William]

hello alexsdad,

I don't claim to be any expert, but there seems to be several issues you need to sort out. The first is what you want, excluding your feelings towards keeping your fiancee happy. The next thing is whether you fiancee is currently ill. In many cases women and men can have few, if any feeling towards a new baby / bump, and there are times I've felt that towards my daughter, though I can recognise it and know that I need to rest or jus time to myself.

It is true that PNI can be preceeded by some form of depression in pregnancy and can occur if it's happened before. It took some persuasion to get my wife to talk to someone about her feelings and looking back now I can see that she was depressed to some extent probably since I knew her. I just didn't know enough to recognise it.

I think you also need to be careful because giving a child away could make her worse if she decides she's made the wrong decision in the future.

I've tried not to be biased, as I could never dream of giving any child away, and I think that it's against everything I believe, but I hope it's given you something to go on.

Best wishes,
William