Recovery and getting better after antenatal and postnatal depression

I still see the psychiatrist. I went from seeing him every three weeks to – we’ve just put a six-week gap in between my appointments, which is a big step forward. I don’t get phone calls anymore from the mental health team, so that’s also another step forward. But the plan is to increase my medication again, so that I can, I guess, feel more steady on a day-to-day basis, and then we’ll sort of have the six-weekly appointments for a while. And if I feel that I reach a crisis, or that it’s not working, I have a really good rapport with him and I can just ring up and say, you know, “I need to see the psychiatrist. There’s something that’s not right”. And I guess that’s also part of learning to stick up for myself.

I think when we’ve really realised that we turned a corner was when I could get through – I could get through just general daily tasks and then they’d be done and I’d turn around and I’d say, “Hey, we had a really good day”. Like, I wasn’t stressed out, I didn’t have a panic attack, I didn’t feel like I couldn’t cope with anything. So it sort of – I guess it happened without me noticing.

And I’d had a couple of really good days and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, that’s what’s been missing from our day, is being upset or being really stressed’. And if I feel like I can cope, my perspective is that the kids, they don’t misbehave, they don’t – they don’t test me or stress me out. Whereas if I’m already stressed, everything they do will stress me out. So with my medication increases, that’s been a big thing which has changed. Probably the biggest thing.

But, yeah I feel like things get easier the sort of – the further we go, the more time that’s passed, things are easier, and the more work I put into it. I know that if I stop and think and take some deep breaths and then do something that it’s going to be a better experience than if I just continue on a spiral of being stressed. So that’s been a big thing for healing. And taking myself seriously has been another one … If I don’t like how our life is going, then I guess I’m really the only person that can change it.

So I went back at about seven months. Purely – coincidentally really. The job that I had previously had finished up but I had another job, a previous employer ring me and I started working for them part-time and for me that was one of the best things that could have happened. It gave me some sense of myself back, something else to do and it actually meant that the days that I was at home with [son’s name] I enjoyed much more. The two or three days that we had together were much more fun because I had some time to myself and I was interacting with other people again, and so for me it was a really good balance to go back to work.

And, yeah the anxiety – so it was all around that time that the anxiety and the sadness, I guess, started to lift. I could – I could begin to move again, walk again and so we could go for walks with the pram and he was a lot older – a lot older, six months but, yeah not, not quite – he wasn’t in that really baby stage and starts to interact more so it becomes more natural.

Yeah, so it was – certainly one of the things that helped me enormously was going back to work. And – and I will do the same again. I was one of the first in my mother’s group to go back to work and even my mum I think thinks that it was too soon but it was the best thing, it was most definitely the best thing for my son and I that I went back to work and he’s absolutely fine at daycare. He got sick like all kids get sick when they go to daycare to start with but, you know, it’s not – I don’t – I didn’t have such an issue with that and it gave me some space.

Yeah, it’s the hardest life I ever had. Sometimes I think why we came. Because always thinking, ‘Yeah, Australia is a good country, everything good’, but we felt we are in hell because it’s very hard. You know, even in my – if I need a drink I always just – [laughs] in Sri Lanka everything come to my hand. I had to learn how to cook meals, how to clean bathroom, toilet and everything [laughs]. Yeah, but we bought washing machine. Then after that little by little, yeah, I got used to that.

Then, after six, seven months, my father gave – I think he gave money, yeah, to buy a car, new car for us. And my mother came. She was surprised because my hair was tangled, tangled. I didn’t even – I haven’t time to even brush my hair. The kids – sometimes, all throw the biscuits everywhere. Then she came and crying, crying, “Look what happened, do you see?” and everything. Then after she came here she bought the laundry basket for us, everything, because otherwise I – one by one, yeah, because I don’t know what to do. I just one – put in other one clothes and hanging and come again, like that. I did everything wrong way, I don’t know what to do.

Then my mother after came, she bought everything, normal living. [We] need things like the mug, hangers, laundry basket, the small basin for the baby, like that.

After that, one and half years, my husband, worked as a tutor. That time he earned money. Then after that not so bad. We coped, we got used to this life and we eat more. We know the cheapest place to buy food from and the vegetables, the clothes, everything. Because I can remember when I first came here I just – I went to Target. I don’t know there’s a Kmart, there was more shops. Then I bought a jacket, $80. It’s huge money for us because we don’t know there’s cheap shops around here like that.

After we used to life and, finally, able to think not 100 per cent but now I feel 75, 80 per cent okay. And I’m happy to live here. But I always miss my family. Now we apply for a loan and we bought a house in [city name], yeah [laughs]. And now I hope everything will be okay in future.

That put me on to halfway towards recovery of sorts … Now that it had a name, now that I knew that it had been described to me as intrusive thoughts and I was able to do a bit of reading and research on it. And Google can be overwhelming yet reassuring in equal measure. It was comforting to be able to read the stories of intrusive thoughts, other women’s experiences and realise that I wasn’t an isolated case. And in talking to – I went to another GP and she was great, she’d seen it all before. And the fact that it was a little bit passé to other mental health practitioners that I’d been in touch with was reassuring as well. Okay, this was a pretty ordinary case of PND. And nothing over the top, but in saying that, the symptoms were still there and they were still really intense.

The second bout of PND is quite different to the first. I think it’s a matter of stress, exhaustion and isolation I guess. It wasn’t really the same emotional territories that I went into after having [my daughter]. I feel like a lot of that through the therapy has in a way been – not really taken care of completely, but it’s been addressed adequately. So that it’s clearly not um, manifesting in the symptoms that I had had previously.

With the intrusive thoughts I think I’ve done with that cycle of the PND … I feel like I’m on the recovery path with that because it is so rare that I have days or moments of the thoughts still coming through. And the level of self-awareness and understanding that I have with that is obviously effective because it’s minimising their presence. So I think it was just intensely valuable to have the opportunity to have regular psychotherapy and to talk it out and I think I worked really, really hard at trying to understand where they were coming from, and to understand the familial history and how that has sort of been embedded into my psyche and my sense of self. And so that’s given me the chance to let go of a lot of that which has led to, I guess not full recovery but on the way.

And this time round with – probably more of a stress and exhaustion-induced postnatal depression it’s been chance to really pause and think about the things that I was doing wrong by, I think sort of overdoing it and taking too much on my plate.

So I was lying in bed and I overheard my husband and my daughter having a bit of a giggle in the bedroom, in her bedroom. And I still really don’t know how, but something just clicked in my head and I just kind of said to myself, ‘I have nothing to lose really, I know what my options are, and let’s just give it a go and if it doesn’t work, I know what to do’. Now that sounds horrible but, you know, that’s what went through my head. So I gave it a go and I was back, I was to a point where that – that day or the next day, I don’t quite remember, I had an appointment with the GP, which was something that was set up before I left to make sure that there was follow up and someone that could, not keep an eye on me but manage the next few weeks for me.

I was able to go, get dressed, go, my husband drove, talked to the doctor in a way that made sense, understand what the doctor was saying to me. And the elation of that was, it was just so exciting to feel like I was back, because I really felt like I’d disappeared, I was just this shell. So yeah, that was the first time that I told my daughter I loved her when I walked into that room. And, you know, she was probably about six weeks old by then. And I meant it because I’d said it before, but didn’t really mean – ah I did – I wasn’t feeling what I thought I would be, so I really meant it, I really thought, ‘Let’s just go with this’.

And after we got back from the US it was summer and I started to feel like, ‘Well I’m over it, I don’t need this medication any more, it’s making me put on weight’, you know, ‘I’ve beaten this thing’. I was told by many people, not professionals, people round me that, “You’re in a way lucky that you have just PND rather than depression because once it goes it goes”. So with that attitude in mind I went to a GP and I came off the medication in a way that I was supposed, so it wasn’t a rash decision by me, it was done in a way that it was supposed to happen.

So I was again put on to antidepressants and again it took some – a couple of very difficult weeks before the medication started to work again. And the toll that it took on my family, even though again they were just rocks around me and around my daughter, of having to deal with this 24 hours a day because I was at home is something that we still are going through. But the difference and the main change I guess in my attitude and the way I look at life that’s come out of the relapse, and I think the relapse has actually changed me in a lot of positive ways, as horrible as it was.

I now and still two years on, surround myself with professionals, rather than just going, ‘Okay, it’s over, I’m fine, I’m back to you know being totally in control’, I’m not afraid to ask for help. I don’t see that as a weakness anymore. So, you know, I still see a psychiatrist once a month, I’m seeing a psychologist to work through some of the emotional issues. I have been very lucky in that I took out income protection insurance before – well before any of this happened. And was only after the relapse that I actually thought, ‘Well, you know what, maybe I need to take things easy, I need to allow myself time to heal’, and the doctors thought exactly the same.

So – and I guess the other thing that it taught me is that in the moment of total despair, in the moment of really dark thoughts, I was able to pull through and I was able to do it twice, which means that I’m far stronger than I thought I actually was, or am. And that gives me a lot of hope that should I have to face this again; I have the belief that I can get past it again.

Now that I’m recovering, rather than recovered, I am far more comfortable with asking for help and also receiving help. So if someone offers the help then I’m happy to accept it. Having said that, I am still very protective of my daughter because there was a time where I didn’t really know what was happening with her and the staff in the hospital I – there’s nothing to suggest that anything untoward happened and she got through it really well, but that – that sense of I wasn’t there as a mother is still there, so it’s – I’m not afraid to ask for help, but I still do a lot of things myself but mostly now because I just enjoy it so much.

And I think that – I was probably mostly, I think, recovered over it or feeling better probably about six weeks before he was due, before he was born.

And I felt that I was ready and I felt like I was able to be able to be the mum that I needed to be. And as there was a – there’s a lot – a big statistic that if you have antenatal depression, it is likely that you’ll have postnatal depression. So we saved some sessions to have after and thankfully went in – I didn’t need to continue going because I didn’t continue to have any depression, which was quite good, because I didn’t really want to be depressed. But – yeah, it was pretty good. I actually felt like I handled having a second one a lot better than I thought I was going to be. So that was awesome.

I felt more normal. I wouldn’t have said that I was like 100 per cent but I definitely felt that I was capable of dealing with it a lot better. And I felt kind of reassured. I felt like, ‘Yep, I’ve got the power to deal with this. I’m okay. I think I’m going to be – I’m going to be awesome. I’m going to be a good mum. I’ve just got to keep that in my mind’. And I think that I was just like, ‘Yep, I can see that – I can see why I was getting stressed and worried and what brought on the depression and I’m putting in these steps to try and make sure that that doesn’t happen. So I’m feeling okay’.

And then you know, maybe I stopped the medication a bit early. I should have may be gone a bit longer, but I just – I think I I’ve got the mental strength to do it, sort of thing. And you know every now and then I sort of think, ‘Oh’. I sort of go through phases. If things aren’t sort of all rosy at home or you know things are just hard, I sort of feel that I can sort of drop a bit and sort of think, ‘Oh, I wonder if I’m going back into depression again’.

And you know and sometimes I think I do a little bit. But you know I’m sort of conscious that, ‘Oh you know, do I need to go see a doctor again?’ I never do. I try not to. But then again, when I sort of come through it again I think, ‘No, I was strong enough again to get through that bout’. So you know, and I never really, I never suffered from depression when I was young that I know of. Nobody in the family did. My father only of the last couple of years because of his ill health and hasn’t really been able to do much. I think the doctors are just, were sort of saying he did a little bit. But he couldn’t really do much, so it’s I guess totally understandable.

So you know I’d sort of, you know – there was no one ever in the family, friends, no one sort of that I’d really known suffered from, from depression. So that was probably why it was a big thing for me to sort of take it on. Nobody in the families had had any sort of mental illness. So again you know that was – so I sort of just got to terms with it. And then I, you know after a while I think I sort of spoke to my sister-in-law who’d had three children and everything was always difficult, and she sort of said to me she cried for the first whole year almost every day. But she didn’t – interestingly and she’s a nurse. I sort of think, somebody medically trained should be a bit more aware of it.

And I don’t think she ever went to see a doctor and I’m sure she wasn’t on any medication. So it was interesting to sort of think how people – how difficult it is to see inside yourself. So I sort of thought, ‘You know I must be strong enough if I could see that I needed the help and I made the call when I needed to’. And I’m aware of it sort of when it comes back. And I just sort, yeah I sort of deal with it and when things are all good it’s gone, and I notice it. You know, I really notice it. It’s, it’s just not there. So, yeah I think it will probably always be an up and down sort of job, but that up and down’s not, it’s quite minimal compared to what it was.

After four years, after more than four years, when I look back, when I review my life, I encourage myself and I say now I can say I’m a very brave woman because I had lots of ups and downs in my life, I had lots of challenges.

But then I was so strong to manage whatever I wanted, to continue my education, to grow my child, to manage my life and to be a good person to my – to be a good friend to all my friends, to be a teacher. I don’t know whether I was – I’m not saying I was very perfect in all those roles, but anyway, it was not really easy to take all those roles.

So, all those days made me a very different person, made me a very strong person. I remember that when I came here I was very emotional, very emotional. I couldn’t make any logical decision in my life, everything was purely based on emotion. I remember that when I came here with every difficult situation I started crying when everything went wrong. Well now these days I hardly cry [laughs]. I try to solve everything, crying doesn’t solve everything, I just try to solve it. And when I compare my life to others’ life, I think that I’m luckier than most of the people who are around me.

Last year, just because I was, I was thinking that, ‘Yes, now I have the chance to help other people’, last year I took a volunteer job at a migrant centre. I remember that every day when I came home I thanked god, oh thank goodness, this life, although very basic, is very good, better than whatever I can see around myself. Yes, now I can say all these challenges made me a very brave person [laughs].

Yeah [laughs], that is very good. Now I know how to do whatever I want. Now I manage my time, I go to read, I go to cinemas, I watch my favourite movies, I do it myself. I send my child to childcare, my husband goes to university, I go to gym. If I have free time I go to cinema, I go shopping and I have lots of non-Iranian friends, but in first/second – in first two years I didn’t have any Australian friends, all my friends were just Iranian. Now I have lots of Australian friends, lots of non-Australian and non-Iranian friends and it is very valuable for me because we exchange lots of valuable information, cultural-social information, yeah.

I think I have a very different view of mental health issues now. I think once you’ve experienced it yourself you have a very different, different view on it. I think – and my GP has said this to me, it’s no different from having the flu. If you have the flu you go to the doctor and you get medication or you get help. It should be no different for mental health and I’m perhaps harsher on myself than I am on other people. If I saw that someone else was suffering from a mental health problem I wouldn’t consider that it was their fault or that they were somehow deficient or they had done something wrong, but we’re always our own harshest critic I think.

So I felt myself that I had done something wrong or was deficient in some way, whereas now I’d like to think that I’d be kinder to myself and kinder to other people that were, that were suffering and that depression is just not a matter of, ‘Well, snap yourself out of it, look at all the things you have to be happy about,’ because when you’re in the midst of it, you know, when you’re in that sort of black hole you – you know intellectually that there’s a lot of things to be happy about and you have beautiful children and you’ve got a safe home to live in, you’ve got enough money for food and all those things that should make you happy but you just can’t feel it, you can’t – you’re stuck down the black hole and you can’t see all of those things.

So it has shifted my view of mental health problems, but having said that I still – there is still some sort of stigma attached for me, and I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable telling everyone that I see, you know, that I had had mental health issues. I’d be concerned that, that I would be viewed differently whereas I would have no concerns telling people that I had to have a Caesar, I had had some physical ailment. So there is still that stigma there.

So just even opening up to things – the alternative ways of treating myself which before I got ill I would never even considered as a lifestyle change because I would have thought, ‘That’s just a whole bunch of rubbish, you know, you just get on with your life, you’re responsible for your life and that’s it’. Rather than looking at myself in a more vulnerable way that, you know, that in the end we’re all mammals. This is something that came up in the mindfulness course that as mammals we want to be part of a group.

And in the past society was far more where everyone helped each other even in raising children. And now we live in such an individualistic society where it’s, you know, the buck stops with me that it almost feels shameful to ask for help because we should be able to do everything ourselves. And, ‘If I can be so successful in school, if I can be so successful in my career, how come suddenly I’m not successful?’, that just becomes such a massive shock to people and you don’t want to ask for help because that looks like … just a failure.

So that change is something I’m actually really grateful for. When I was ill I had to expose myself to others in ways that I never have before. And since then the friendships that I’ve made have been the deepest and the most real friendships I’ve ever made because I’m not afraid to be vulnerable in front of others. So, would I want – would I want to go through this again? No. And I’m taking steps to make sure that I never do, that I never have a relapse again. But at the same time, rather than thinking of it as a closed chapter, I make steps to make sure that I do all I can, that it doesn’t happen again. But at the same time, if it does, I know what to look for.

Yeah, so I definitely – the hospital definitely taught me how to cope better. How to manage that when I know to walk away and when I need to sort of hang in there and be strong. So – and rise above it I guess. When I say be strong, as in just find it in yourself to just look past what’s actually happening right now and just work through it. So it did teach me a lot.

I think – I made a very good friend in hospital, who was actually [laughs] a psychologist herself, in child protection as her job – yes [laughs]. And she made the experience so much more bearable. And we’re still – we’re very close friends to this day, and that’s – if I ever try – like if I ever think about what was good that came out of the whole experience was the friendships that are made, my relationship with my husband. It really puts it through the wringer. So I think the relationships that I’ve formed and developed sort of since having postnatal depression have been key to my recovery as well. To have their support and unconditional – they’ve seen me at my absolute worst, so – and they were still there, so – and I know a lot of people don’t have that so I was very lucky in that respect.

Yeah, so I think also I’ve definitely learnt how to look at things differently and just be really mindful of the way I’m thinking and how I guess I learnt that’s negative thinking, which it makes a difference. It does make a difference. But you can’t sort of see that until you’re through the fog sort of thing, and you’re sort of back on track and you’re getting the help you need, you know, from the medication and the counselling and sort of your support network and that sort of thing. So yeah, I think I just have a better take on life in general now.

So there is an – it sounds strange – but there is an upside to postnatal depression I think. Yeah, it’s a massive learning curve and it’s an awful experience that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but I’m happy with where I’m at now, and maybe I would have been in a different place if I hadn’t have gone through it. But that being said, I wouldn’t want to go through it again, so I don’t plan on having any more children. But that could be just because it’s still relatively raw. But I don’t think it is. I think we’re pretty content with just the three of us. We’re a good little unit and we love it the way it is, so I think that we’ll sort of stay that way, and we’re just in a good place.

I don’t think a lot about the future. I think about what’s happened in the past a lot and about what’s happening now. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in the here and now as far as with my partner with her health and everything, I don’t like to think about the future because of the future was not good at that time. But I’m getting there. I’ve started seeing – I’ve got a new girlfriend now and things like that and it’s starting to look up I think. Yeah I’m a lot happier now than what I was for a long time.

At the time I didn’t think about anything. I just thought about my partner’s health and the kids. I didn’t really think about me for a long time. But then after – yeah I started thinking about me and thinking, ‘I’m not as happy as I thought I would be,’ and that our relationship wasn’t where I thought it would be at the time. And that’s when I think it all started to come to a head and we ended up splitting up. It was because I eventually just sat and thought about where I wanted to be and what had happened and about our relationship. Yeah, and that was the problem. That’s where it all started I think. I started thinking about me rather than other people and my happiness.

Now I think I’m in a happier place and I think she’s in a happier place now. It’s been horrific but I think it had to get horrific for it to get better. Yeah I’m not sure it would have gotten better if it hadn’t of got so bad possibly. But I think it’s looking up now.

Now all this is over I’m finding that now I’m starting to think about the future because the future is a happier place I think now. Whereas the future was going to be bad before.