“I’ve tried to reach out to postpartum depression support organizations, but they have voicemail machines instead of people … and I never end up leaving a message. By the time they call back maybe I’ll be fine again? Maybe my daughter will be napping and I won’t want to take the call and, consequently (she’s a very, VERY light sleeper), wake her up. So I just hang up.”

This issue, which I was reminded of by the recent Postpartum Progress reader comment above, has been bothering me for a long time. I have heard it many times from women who are desperately seeking help. They finally decide to make that call and are met with “Please leave a message after the beep.”

I understand why, of course. Most of the support organizations for postpartum depression & related illnesses are all-volunteer and have very limited budgets. They do awesome, heroic work. I’m not questioning them. I know there are many issues around having a hotline.

I also understand why being met with a machine is not the ideal situation for a mother who needs answers and immediate support. I think of the moms who are crying, alone in the dark, at 3 in the morning. What if they had someone to talk to at that moment who really understood?

I remember when I first decided to reach out for help for my postpartum OCD. It was unbelievably scary. I was uncertain. I didn’t know who to call, or if I should tell them exactly what was going through my mind. Would they arrest me? Take my kids away? I think that if a live person hadn’t answered the phone, I wouldn’t have left a message either. I would have crawled back into my hole. I also think that if someone answered but that someone didn’t know much about postpartum OCD and wasn’t able to talk with me intelligently about what I was going through I would have gotten off the phone in a hurry.

It’s my dream that one day there will be a 24-hour hotline staffed by experts and survivors that is specifically for women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.

What do you think? Would that be awesome, or is what we have now enough?