Therese Borchard, who writes the Beyond Blue blog at Beliefnet, shares her postpartum anxiety story with Postpartum Progress today:
Although I can’t remember a time in my childhood or adolescence that I lived without depression and anxiety, I guess you could say that I officially joined the elite mentally ill club in 1989, my freshman year at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, when I went by the Counseling and Career Development Center to inquire about local support groups (I was just a few months sober). One of the therapists politely invited me back.
A few months later she rattled off a handful of diagnoses: obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorder, anxiety disorder, and depression. She strongly suggested antidepressants, but I resisted. Like fellow twelve-steppers, I thought they would compromise my sobriety. And with my Catholic friends and mentors, I regarded them as a crutch and a short cut from the pain that was necessary for spiritual growth.
“Life doesn’t have to be this hard,” my counselor told me, giving me a copy of Colette Dowling’s book, You Mean I Don’t Have to Feel This Way. A year and a half later, when I was experiencing suicidal thoughts, I finally cried uncle, clinging to the lifeboat (or prescription) God sent me. After a few trial and error experiments, my doctor and I stumbled on the combination of Prozac and Zoloft, which allowed me to concentrate enough to study, and relax enough to tell a dirty joke (one of my favorite things to do).
Then I got married, in 1996, and made small people (David and Katherine are now 6 and 4). After the two births, my hormones huddled together to ask each other what the hell they were supposed to be doing now that no baby was in the womb or on the breast. My neurotransmitters (the good guys responsible for feelings of well-being) caught an express train to another brain (the one content with instant oatmeal). Brain cells began to shrink (and I suspect croak) in my prefrontal cortex. A tumor grew in my pituitary gland (also in the brain). And I had a bona fide, genuine mental breakdown. There was nothing mini about it.
I lost twenty 23 pounds (I could wear an Ann Taylor size 2! That was the only perk.) because I had no appetite (this alone signaled a serious crisis, given my love of all things edible), I contracted one urinary tract infection after another because my immune system was breaking down, I breathed into a paper bag every morning during a panic attack, and I trembled and flailed like Linda Blair in the “Exorcist” because my anxiety was so acute.
Oh yeah, and the endless sobbing: in the deli line at the grocery (“No, it’s not the chicken salad, I just got my period”), in the waiting room at my gynecologist-obstetrician’s office (“I’m sorry, pictures of babies make me cry”), on the hayride at David’s class trip to the pumpkin patch (“I’m allergic to hay”), at Eric’s company dinners (“Please give him a raise”), at Katherine’s physical therapy sessions (“Will she ever walk?”), during sex (“Are you almost done? I have to blow my nose”), in church (twice as hard if we sang “On Eagle’s Wings” or “Be Not Afraid”), and yada yada yada.
It took two trips to the psych ward, seven different psychiatrists, one endocrinologist, 23 different medication combinations, and several MRIs over two years’ time to get me well again. In other words, I upgraded to the platinum club membership in Club D. Diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder, I graduated beyond the casual, my-primary-care-physician-can-prescribe-me-my-meds to the critical, regular check-ins with a head doctor.
Although I have cussed out God too many times to count, asking him what kind of marijuana he was smoking the day he designed my brain, I agree with Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, that “tumultuousness, if coupled with discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing. That unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life, one ought to be on good terms with one's darker side and one's darker energies.”
