21 | Sarah
“Still healing, still suffering, still trying to take each day as it comes, but more and more grateful for the amazing friends I've made along the way.”
Catch up on part one of Sarah’s story in episode 20
“I had fallen into that trap of thinking ‘I was sick, now I’m getting better, and that’s it. Every day from here on in will be better and better. I’m all sorted!’ It turned out that wasn’t the case . . . it does seem like a cartoon where I’m walking towards the rake and I’m about to step on it and have it come up and hit me in the face and the audience knows that it’s coming, but I’m entirely unaware.”
When Sarah was discharged from the mother-and-baby psychiatric hospital, she felt both refreshed and proud. Her recovery from postpartum anxiety and OCD became a badge of honour.
But that wasn’t the end of Sarah’s story with maternal mental ill health. Severe depression, a medication change, a presentation to the emergency department, and a second and third MBU admission filled pages of a book she thought she had already closed.
Join me for part two of Sarah’s story as she is once again forced to confront the way she sees mental health, recovery, and herself, and where she grapples with both the relief and shame around being a ‘frequent flyer’ of the psychiatric hospital.
Please note, this episode discusses suicidality and suicidal ideation. Go gently.
“I had fallen into that trap of thinking ‘I was sick, now I'm getting better, and that's it. Every day from here on in will be better and better. I'm all sorted!’”
“It turned out that wasn't the case.”
“It does seem like a cartoon where I'm walking towards the rake and I'm about to step on it and have it come up and hit me in the face and the audience knows that it's coming, but I'm entirely unaware. So it is funny in a slapstick way if it weren't so dark.”
“Each time I've struggled with mental illness over the past couple of years, it's often been triggered by a physical difficulty.”
“After a month or so of being home from the MBU, Tilly had a seizure, and we're incredibly lucky that nothing came of it. It seems like it was just one of those things. We went to hospital and she didn't obviously have an infection. They couldn't find that there was something wrong, which they were testing for because febrile seizures are very common in babies. They did all of those tests and those were normal.”
“They sent us home with advice on what to look out for, for epilepsy and so on. She continued to be robustly healthy otherwise, and thankfully has had another seizure. So I do think it was just one of those things. It was very, unfortunately, timed for us, happening only a month or so after my admission had ended, because it really showed me just how fragile I still was.”
“I think that shock of seeing her have the seizure, having to take her to hospital, the uncertainty of whether she was going to be okay, it did set me back and did lead to a lapse.”
“The first time I went to the MBU, it did feel like the anxiety and OCD were paramount. This second time when I had a lapse, it felt like it was time for depression to take centre stage.”
“I felt like I was sliding backwards. I couldn't listen to her cry without feeling incredibly triggered and anxious and depressed once again. So the first time I went to the MBU, it did feel like the anxiety and OCD were paramount. This second time when I had a lapse, it felt like it was time for depression to take centre stage.”
“Rather than feeling like I couldn't sit still and I had to be constantly active and was always on the lookout for threats, this time around it was much more not having energy, not being able to get to sleep at night, but then not being able to rouse myself in the morning, being stuck in cycles of negative, depressive thinking about my relationship with the baby, back to those thoughts of, ‘I'm a terrible mother, I'm not doing the right thing by her. I'm failing her. She's so vulnerable, and I'm not protecting her.’”
“As opposed to previously, when that had been accompanied by, ‘What if something happens to her?’ This was almost more fatalistic, like bad things are happening to her, and I'm not doing anything, I'm not doing enough, therefore, I have already failed her.”
“And so that that spiralled into a negative place relatively quickly, which took me by surprise. It challenged that view that I'd had that, ‘okay, I'm fixed now. I'm all good. I'm better.’ I definitely wasn't. And I think partly because it wasn't what I was expecting, I was probably a bit blasé and not attentive enough to what I was feeling.”
“On discharge from the MBU, I built a recovery plan, as we all do, of: these are the symptoms I have to look out for, this is what I'm going to do in terms of self-care and practicing therapy skills, this is who I'm going to ask for help, or all of those good things that you should be doing. Instead, I let things slide.”
“I could tell I'm having some negative thoughts. This isn't great. But I just let myself keep going with daily routines without really changing things up and devoting more time to dealing with those thoughts, processing them, applying skills to work that through and acknowledging that they were harmful thoughts or to doing anything to look after myself on the positive side, like crafting time for exercise or for things like art that I really enjoy that would have created more positivity in my day.”
“I think one thing I’ve always struggled with is when I’m backsliding, I tend to try to protect myself by cutting down on commitments and trying to reduce how much ‘work’ I have to do. And I still see those kinds of supports as ‘work’ even though they’re supposed to be things that take a load off.”
“I think one thing I've always struggled with is when I'm backsliding, I tend to try to protect myself by cutting down on commitments and trying to reduce how much work I have to do. And I still see those kinds of supports as work, even though they're supposed to be things that take a load off. I think due to the social anxiety component of it all. So my memory of it is I did access those services say in the first fortnight I was home. And then in the second fortnight, I started cancelling appointments or not taking calls or coming up with excuses, which I've subsequently identified is like something I really need to stay on top of because it's ultimately a negative behaviour in the sense that it makes things worse for me. And it's also a pretty good warning sign that things are going wrong when I start to do that to myself. I was hooked up with good supports, but started removing myself from them.”
“And then I slid a bit further and I thought, ‘Oh, this is really serious. I should do something about it now’. But I only realised that once things had slid too far and found myself in quite a deep pit of depression to the extent that I no longer felt able to do anything about it… I skipped the first couple of steps on the safety plan that were minor actions like take yourself for a walk or call the GP.”
“I went through feelings of worthlessness: ‘I'm a terrible mother’. Feelings of hopelessness: ‘I'm a terrible mother, and I can't do anything about it’. And then that led to unsafe thoughts of: ‘I'm a terrible mother. I can't do anything about it. And therefore the only way out of this situation is to end things.’”
“And that felt like a new low in how much I could frighten myself. I was a long way from taking antidepressants being the most scary thing that had happened to me. This was a whole new frontier of being afraid.”
“And that felt like a new low in how much I could frighten myself. I was a long way from taking antidepressants being the most scary thing that had happened to me. This was a whole new frontier of being afraid.”
“I did make use of resources like the mental health line in New South Wales and some of those crisis services and ended up reporting to the ED (emergency department) to say that I didn't feel safe, that I was worried for myself and for the baby.”
“It's strange looking back, it felt like I was so depressed I didn't feel like I could get out of the house to go for a walk, but it felt relatively, not easy, but relatively straightforward to take that step of going to hospital. And I'm forever grateful that, as one of the doctors put it, I am help-seeking because I think it was literally a lifesaver for me that I was able to acknowledge this time around, ‘Well, this is something I can't deal with on my own. This is a dangerous situation to be in, so I'm going to get the parachute active.’”
“And that was another scary experience, but also another really supportive one. From the ED, I ended up being admitted to the Marie Bashir Centre at RPA, which is their mental health centre, and ended up being there for, I think, maybe a little over a week.”
“After being assessed by the psychiatrist there, they agreed that it would make sense for me to go back to the MBU for another admission, because in talking to the psychiatrists, the consistent themes were, ‘I feel like I need help, but also I'm really missing my baby, and it's not helping my mental health to be away from my baby.’ And mother-baby units, that's literally the reason that they exist!”
“As it happened, they didn't have a bed in the MBU right away. That was why it ended up being about a week until I was able to make it to the MBU.”
“That was hard, and it was definitely very revealing being on a general mental health ward in a public hospital, how different an experience that was to being in a mother-baby unit. There was much more variety in the experiences of the other patients on the ward. There were people who were a lot sicker than the people that I'd met on the MBU, but also I felt a lot sicker than I'd been on the MBU. So that was a challenging time.”
”They have so many great practitioners there who do wonderful work, but it's just they're designed for the majority of patients who are not parents of a baby.”
“I was still pumping. I've always done mixed feeding with Tilly, and that is one area where the nurses in the centre went above and beyond. I had brought my own pump, but didn't have access to a way to sanitise the parts. And so they went and rustled up one of the hospital pumps from the maternity unit at RPA, which was heaps better than mine, and made sure that I had access to that, which was lovely and felt like that felt like a validation of part of my identity. The whole experience was challenging to who I thought I was. But they were saying, ‘Yeah, of course, you're a mum. Of course, you can have access to this. Of course, we acknowledge that despite the fact that you're so unwell, this is still part of who you are.’ And so they supported that.”
“There was officially no visiting because it was during COVID. They made a compassionate exception for Tilly because they could see that it was very traumatic for me to be apart from her and was contributing to the web of guilt and depression I was in... I’m very grateful that they made that accommodation, and I think they had to cut some red tape to make that happen.”
”There was officially no visiting because it was during COVID. They made a compassionate exception for Tilly because they could see that it was very traumatic for me to be apart from her and was contributing to the web of guilt and depression I was in to feel like, well, I'm away from my baby because I sought help for myself, which wasn't helping my mindset. So I was able to see her for half an hour or an hour a day, most days. So it ended up being not every day, and it had to be supervised as well. So there had to be a nurse or a doctor in the room with us while she was there. I'm very grateful that they made that accommodation, and I think they had to cut some red tape to make that happen because they could see that it was important to me.”
“But it was, again, just such a stark difference from the MBU, where, of course, you're with your baby. This is a big part of what you're experiencing and why you're experiencing it. And being with baby is best for mum and baby. It was such a stark difference and made me so, so grateful that I had access to an MBU and really brought home just how critical that is as a service. Because if the Marie Bashir Centre had been my only option, I'm sure they would have saved my life. They were wonderful and they do amazing work. But it would have been so sour and so difficult to go through that process of recovery without having Tilly with me.”
“I know that they were struggling with staff, it was the height of the nursing staff shortages. I got the impression that normally there would have been more in the way of therapy programmes, but it ended up being quite boring and quite lonely that I think I met with the psychiatrists once a day or every second day. For the rest of the time, it was just wandering around watching TV or doing puzzle books.”
“But it really just heightened the difference between being there and being at home, that looking after a nine-month-old kept me incredibly busy. And suddenly here I was, like getting sick of the sight of Sudokus because I had done nothing else for the past several hours and hanging out for mealtime because it would be something to do.”
“I ended up with this process of really taking my time to eat, not out of any mindfulness practice, but just because it was something to do. I would make myself a cup of tea and then sit down and have the bread roll. And then I would get up and get a glass of water and eat the main course very slowly just to try and fill in time until it was time to go to bed.”
“I'd gone from the start of my experience being terrified about being disturbed in the night and having to attend to Tilly. And instead, after they took our phones, the nights just stretched out as this long period of nothing to do and no one to interact with because everyone was just in their rooms trying to sleep. Yeah, it was such a strange and difficult period. And I just I think in many ways, fussing about the baby and about the things to do to look after the baby can become over the top if you're struggling with anxiety.”
“I was also in this liminal space of not knowing when a bed would free up on the MBU. So I just looked forward to bed every night because maybe the next morning we would get a call from their MBU, and I would know when things were going to change.”
“I was so grateful when a bed did open up and I was able to go back to the MBU. It was funny, again, it was a dichotomy of, ‘I'm scared to be back here and that my recovery has ‘failed’ in inverted commas’, but also, ‘I'm grateful to be back here, particularly compared to the unfamiliar territory of RPA.’”
“I felt like when I walked into the MBU, I knew the way it smelled. I knew the way the rooms were set up. I knew where to find the coffee and tea in the kitchen. And most of all, I was able to walk in there with Matilda, and that felt amazing. That in itself felt like a big step towards recovery to be back with her and to be able to continue to pursue health and skills development in her company. So to not be missing out on being around her.”
“So it was a real blend of emotions and experiences. I think in terms of the actual living it out and going through the program again, that felt good, I think, because it was familiar. So I knew what to expect. I knew some of the ropes. I had lost some of the anxiety around what's it going to be like.”
“I felt like going back to Hogwarts for the second year, and Harry knows his way around the grounds and knows which teachers he can push the boundaries with and not... It also felt positive and safe in that I knew this was a place where I could come back from feeling really unwell and I could experience recovery. So it felt hopeful to be there and particularly to be reunited with Tilly.”
“It was so positive being back with Tilly that I had a real spring in my step then. I felt so good being back with her and being able to get back into our routine and being able to do fun things with her that even in one of my first discussions with the registrar, she was saying, ‘You seem quite happy and quite well.’ I was trying to explain, ‘I actually feel really unwell, but just relative to how lonely I was feeling a few days ago, this feels really good.’”
”On the flip side of that, it also felt scary in some ways that the recovery I had previously experienced there had not been perfect, I guess. It hadn't fixed me all the way and hadn't been able to withstand all future experiences that I wasn't cured once and for all. So there was an element of, ‘Am I going to get better at all this time? Or is this new level of illness, have I now reached the level of mental illness where other people can't help me and I won't experience recovery? Or will I feel better again, but it's actually a mirage and it won't last. I'll go home feeling better, but it's just another pick me up and I'll be back in another month?’”
“And then I think there was a new element of shame that I had ended up feeling proud of the fact that I had been able to seek help to go through treatment and to come out the other side feeling better. So it almost became a bit of a badge of honour of I am open and vulnerable, and I'm a person who has experienced perinatal mental illness and recovered, and I am able to talk to people about my experience.”
“That was another little breaking down of identity - I’m not able to say I was ‘one and done’ when it came to lapses in mental health. I’m back here for a second time. And what does that mean? What does that mean for the person I am?”
“But there was a new level of shame of, ‘Oh, no, I'm back here again’. And it felt okay to do this once, but now I feel like I'm malingering, or like it's embarrassing to tell people I'm back here for a second time because it's old news and they've already used up all of their care and support for me. And now it just seems like scary and unfamiliar and maybe chronic as well. So that was another little breaking down of identity - I'm not able to say I was ‘one and done’ when it came to lapses in mental health. I'm back here for a second time. And what does that mean? What does that mean for the person I am? Does that mean I will just constantly be in and out of the hospital for the rest of my life? How do I present myself to people? How do I describe this to other people without feeling ashamed for having to seek help again, having to do this again?”
”I do think I still struggle with the shame and anxiety of being a recurrent user of the MBU and almost a ‘frequent flyer’ because it's a salutary lesson in the uncertainty of life. That, just as with most things in life, mental wellbeing isn't assured and it isn't perfect and it isn't binary. But you have to live with that and make the best of that that you can. As a person with anxiety, my brain is always struggling to find the answer and to deal with uncertainty by coming up with a solution. That second admission was a real testing ground for teaching myself ‘you're not going to be able to do that when it comes to understanding what your future mental health is going to look like.’”
“I started the process towards accepting that then. But there is still some element of difficulty and negativity in understanding that about myself. It's still a bit of a work in progress to accept that about myself that I wasn't able to... It almost feels like a teacher's pet thing that I had to go back and do a remedial course in perinatal mental health that once wasn't enough and I had to re-sit the test, which is acknowledging my fallibility and vulnerability. I do think that's a bit of a work in progress.”
“I didn't feel as well going home the second time as I did the first. I still felt depressed and was a bit frustrated to not go home with more energy, whereas it felt like I'd been able to get quite a good hold on my anxiety in the first admission. Then in the second admission, I had got back to a more stable place, definitely, and a place where I could see that recovery was possible and I had more hope. I didn't feel as depressed. I no longer felt unsafe, but I still felt like low in energy and still plagued by negative self-talk and fatalistic thinking and low appetite.”
“I almost felt a bit short-changed like, ‘No, I did my time. I was here for three weeks. I'm supposed to be back to normal now. What's happening?’ So that was challenging. I do think it was helpful for my recovery because it was yet another push towards a more resilient view of myself and my wellbeing as something that is always changing, which means it can change for the worse, but it means I have more autonomy over being able to change it for the better.”
“And it was yet another fear that I had to address of, I could be a person who was depressed just out in the world, not in hospital, having to shop for groceries and go to the dentist and so on. And it was possible to have those experiences at the same time. It was possible to be depressed and to live a normal, happy life. I was particularly impressed that I was able to still feel joy and silliness and playfulness and enjoy going for coffee with friends despite feeling quite depressed. So I think grateful that I was able to have those moments because those little things always gave me hope and very relieved that both things could be true.”
“The fact that I can feel unwell and still engage in the world is a good way to challenge that tendency to say, ‘No, you are able to do both, even though it feels hard and it doesn't feel that fair that you have to do this,’ which is then useful because it's better for me to keep up being a part of the world when I'm not feeling well.”
“We gave more attention to ordinary small things that would make me feel good on days when I was struggling to feel good. So the first time, because my anxiety was predominant, there was a lot of stuff around remembering these techniques that you find helpful to get on top of breathing and to get on top of sleep and to remember to wind down.”
“Whereas, the second time, I remember [the psychiatrist] saying, ‘You need to treat going for walks in the sunshine with friends as seriously as taking your medication. That is part of our prescription to you. It's not just indulgent self-care when you find the time. This is actually something you need to do.’”
“To me, it's always seemed like treating my illness is a combination of reducing the negative effects that I feel while also fueling the positivity in my life. I came home that second time with a real determination to do good things that made me feel happy, not see them as indulgent, but to see them as essential to health in the same way as taking medication would be.”
”In general, that time felt like I was building to a more sustainable model of parenting with a somewhat older child who was approaching her first birthday, so had better sleep, was able to eat solids, was able to crawl and eventually walk, and so was able to occupy herself for longer periods of time. So she objectively became easier to deal with. But also I felt like I was building my repertoire, my resilience, my skills, my routine to something that balanced the responsibility of taking care of her with time for myself.”
“I felt that I was in a more positive and resilient place, that I was less afraid of experiencing uncomfortable emotions like sadness or fear, but also just on balance, experienced more contentment and satisfaction.”
“I think that the keyword was ‘sustainable’. Probably for one of the first times, I felt like ‘I can do this’ ... I should probably be conscious in the future that every time I think I’m a super mum, I’m about to experience something of a lapse. It’s definitely pride comes before a fall.””
“Around that time, I extended my maternity leave. I had originally taken a year, and I took an extra year of unpaid leave because I felt like this is what I wanted from maternity leave. It's not all easy. There's still times when the baby cries. There's still times when I'm really frustrated that she did another poop after I just changed her nappy! But it felt good. It felt like I knew what I was doing, and I was enjoying her company and enjoying my own company and seeing friends and doing therapy. I think that the keyword was ‘sustainable’. Probably for one of the first times, I felt like ‘I can do this.’”
As it so happens, that second MBU admission wasn’t Sarah’s final admission to the MBU - which is something she laughs about now: “I had managed to join the loyalty program at that time!”
“I was able to benefit from the MBU for a third time. As with the previous lapses, I had another lapse in mid-late 2022 that was precipitated by physical illness in the family. It took longer, like more drawn out series of events that precipitated it, which I think is a sign of the fact that I was building resilience, that it took more to unsettle me than it had previously.”
“We had the good fortune to go and visit my brother and his family when they were living in the US. And that was a wonderful time. For a fair bit of that time, I was there with Tilly on my own. I flew overseas with her on my own. And again, felt like super mum. Like, ‘wow, look at me. I'm doing this. I'm in a foreign country with my baby. Look at me go.’ I should probably be conscious in the future that every time I think I'm a super mum, I'm about to experience something of a lapse. It's definitely pride comes before a fall.”
“Probably when I get to that mindset, I feel a bit cocky about self-care. I stop doing some of the things I need to do to take care of myself because it feels like things are going so well. And the sting in the tail was when we came home from the US, we all got COVID… We didn't have ongoing complications other than I struggled a lot with fatigue and felt tired for a long time. And then life got back to normal, relatively, except for my tiredness.”
“Tilly went back to daycare. And then she just started facing this like, barrage of childcare illnesses that feels like one of the great injustices of having a toddler in daycare - that they just get sick so often! Not only is the baby sick, but you're sick as well. So whatever other plans you had are screwed. And it was just relentless… Just the stress and exertion of having to keep looking after a baby who was so sick and who wasn't sleeping and who was crying all the time.”
“That eventually wore me down.”
“It was quite a similar experience of the lapse of withdrawing from the world, cancelling appointments, beginning to think more negative thoughts, getting stuck in these patterns of self-criticism, aided this time by the fact that because Tilly was home from daycare and because I was sick, it seemed more reasonable to pull out of coffee with people… And I was struggling with this fatigue as well. So I felt it was easier and easier for my anxious brain to come up with reasons to withdraw.”
“So yet again, I didn't notice the red flags. I didn't act on those first one, two, three, four steps of the recovery and relapse prevention plan. And once again, found myself back in a pit of depression and starting to have unsafe thoughts again and thought, ‘Right, oops, I did it again!’”
“It was the same pattern. And so that time, I went back to RPA again and was assessed as not needing to be admitted to RPA, which I think was good and bad. Good, because it meant I wasn't apart from Tilly, bad because I felt like I needed support and it was difficult having to go home on my own… I wasn't able to take a break from parenting.”
“After I'd had this experience where I'd been to the ED and sent home, I went to the GP and said, ‘Look, I don't think I'm coping. I've contacted St. John of God, and they've said it might be one to three weeks before I can get an admission there. Rpa won't take me because I'm not unwell enough, but there has to be something in between. I feel like I'm slipping between the two options here, and I need more help.’”
“She was wonderful. She had this really detailed conversation with me... And she sent me back to the waiting room and called St. John of God, worked her magic… I'm eternally grateful for her because I had felt like I don't know what I'm going to do for the next three weeks. Suddenly it was down to, I only have to manage for the next 24 hours.”
“It was also a scary prospect because the MBU only takes kids up to the age of one. I was faced with going to the general wards of St. John of God without Tilly. Tilly wasn't going to be able to stay with me. Andrew wasn't going to be able to come and stay. I was going to be in a different part of the hospital, which felt scary, and it was yet another new bridge to cross as well. But still, I knew St. John of God and knew that it was a place where recovery could happen. So it was a bit of a mixed bag of emotions.”
“I think the MBU was full at that point. And so, yes, I just went to a bed on, I think it's the mood disorders ward. So it was people experiencing depression and anxiety. And I was placed in group therapy. It was a similar structure to the MBU, but with less parent craft. Group therapy daily and access to different things like exercise and art therapy. And I was placed in one of those general group programs. The doctor and the registrar then worked to get me moved to a bed on the MBU, which happened after a couple of days which was wonderful because it was familiar.”
“I felt more at home. And the added benefit was that it's also more child-friendly. So because it had that bigger play space, it meant that Tilly could come and hang out there during visiting hours.”
“It was a funny experience to be back there, to be like this ‘graduate’ of the MBU who was there still as a mother, but without the baby component of being on the MBU. But I was so grateful that they were able to exercise that flexibility.”
“It was a funny experience to be back there, to be like this ‘graduate’ of the MBU who was there still as a mother, but without the baby component of being on the MBU. But I was so grateful that they were able to exercise that flexibility.”
“I kept going to the general therapy group, partly because at that point, it felt useful to have exposure to people who were experiencing anxiety and depression outside of the perinatal context… I had the best of both worlds. I was able to take part in that general program, but then still have the comforts of the MBU and the camaraderie of the other mothers as well.”
”That time around, I did a medication change. I had been on Sertraline for about 18 months, and I had gone up in dosage over time at various points, and I had maxed out that dosage of Sertraline. So as part of the admission, I moved on to Venlafaxine as just a different med to try, and as an SNRI, having a slightly different mechanism to an SSRI, [the psychiatrist] thought it might be useful.”
“I guess it was a different experience again from the previous two, because I was going through the effects of withdrawing from the Sertraline and then coming on to the Venlafaxine, which was really intense in its own way.”
“Coming off the Sertraline, I was so intensely moody and sensitive. It was like being a parody of a teenage girl. I would cry at the drop of the hat. And then the next moment, I would feel over the moon, just passionately in love with Tilly and with my husband and with my friends. And then the next moment, distraught about the nature of the world and the fact that it was raining and I couldn't go for a run.”
“I remember saying to the registrar like, ‘Is this just the side effects of the medication? Or is this what I'd be like if I wasn't on an antidepressant? Because this is wild.’ And she assured me it was just my body adjusting to the sudden change in serotonin that it was receiving, which was good to hear.”
“They tried to do it as quickly as I could tolerate so that I would be able to start up on the new med and start feeling the impacts of that. So it was quite rapid. I think I went from the full dose of Sertraline 200 milligrams a day down to zero over the course of slightly less than a week. So it was quite significant when it had taken me 18 months to get up to 200 milligrams.”
“Then starting on the Venlafaxine was also a big jump because that had its own side effects. It took longer to build up in my body, so I don't feel like I so much felt the psychological impact quickly. It was maybe four to six weeks before I started feeling that. But I did start feeling the physical impacts quite quickly around dizziness. Like, in particular, if I was standing up and I turned my body, I would feel so dizzy that I'd have to sit down.”
“I left the hospital without an antidepressant working for me, which was different to the first two discharges because the Venlafaxine hadn’t yet built up to a therapeutic dose. And that was hard that I didn’t have that stabilising my baseline. In some ways, though, it meant that it was a real taste of what my non-medicinal toolkit involved.”
“It was actually one of the reasons it was useful being in the general mood disorders group that a bunch of people in there happened to be in there for medication changes. So we were going through that together. And so it's funny, I left the hospital without an antidepressant working for me, which was different to the first two discharges because the Venlafaxine hadn't yet built up to a therapeutic dose. And that was hard that I didn't have that stabilising my baseline.”
“In some ways, though, it meant that it was a real taste of what my non-medicinal toolkit involved, that any benefits I was experiencing were just based on what I was able to do through therapy and different skills to reduce the negative symptoms and boost positivity.”
“I actually found it very hard coming home that time. I think partly because I had been only seeing Tilly during visiting hours. I hadn't had her with me on the MBU and hadn't been mothering that whole time. It was much more of a dramatic shift back into going home and having to look after her the whole time.”
“I had a couple of trial visits going home, which was something I hadn't been able to do the previous year because of COVID. It actually felt really unpleasant. I'd spend a couple of hours at home and then think, ‘I want to go back to the hospital. I don't want to be here. This is hard. I want to just have time to myself to do my own thing’. That was quite scary, where I thought that maybe after this third time, I'm not going to be able to adapt back to the normal world. It was something that I had to manage quite carefully with [the psychiatrist] and then with my outpatient psychologist to reset my expectations, to be gentle with myself, to get positive associations with home.”
“I think in retrospect, while that was a really challenging period, it did prove to me that it wasn't just the meds, right? I was able to do stuff on my own!”
Sarah’s advice:
“I think my number one piece of advice, even when you feel scared of the smallest thing, even when it feels like everything in your life is so hard, the only step you need to be able to take is to ask for help. You can be in a place where it feels like even beginning to address and unpick and deal with the symptoms you're experiencing just feels like a whole other load that you can't possibly take on. In fact, you really only need to take that first step of disclosing that you're struggling because there is such a wealth of support out there for you.”
“And if you're, in inverted commas, ‘wrong’ - we've both spoken about how we were so concerned that we weren't actually sick enough to seek help. And we were, it was our brains tricking us - but if we had been ‘wrong’ and we had gone to a GP or a psychologist or a psychiatrist and said we're really struggling, there is really no worst-case scenario, right? The worst outcome is for them to say, ‘Hey, parenting is really tough. It seems like you're having a really hard time right now. I'm not sure that ‘insert service here’, psychiatric hospital or medication or XYZ is quite what you need. But here's all of the other services that you can access.’”
“And I really doubt that any parent would be turned away from at least doing talk therapy. Anyone can benefit from that, let alone people who have gone through the incredibly life-changingly complex emotional event that is becoming a parent!”
“The hardest part of it is just finding a person to ask for help and asking for help. It's a no-lose situation. You can only benefit from doing that.”
“The undercurrent of that is that there's hope that it is worth taking that brave step of exposing yourself and asking for help because though that seems difficult, recovery is possible. And so, it is so valuable to you and your family and your baby for you to seek help and to get better so you can get back to loving, and enjoying, and struggling with, and being overwhelmed by, but coping with, parenthood as the wonderful, awful experience it can be.”
