Lindsay Clancy & the 13 Medications Prescribed to Her: 48 Hours of No Sleep After New Med

Stephanie Soo (0:02)

If you ever find the urge to occupy yourself entirely with learning about the directionality of strollers and the stroller wheels, is it an all-wheel baby stroller? There is dense literature to be read on Reddit forums about parenting and baby strollers. You will come out more educated on strollers and stroller wheels, but also equally confused on which exact stroller you should get for your new baby. But that is the surface-level content on these parenting forums. It does in fact get much deeper, because you could always stumble upon a post asking, is it normal to hear cries that aren't really there in the middle of the night? Like phantom cries. They used to call it insanity of lactation. Postpartum psychosis is not like a new modern-day language. It's not a modern-day thing. Back in the day, they said it was insanity of lactation. Postpartum psychosis, however, I will say, is not the same thing as postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is quite common. One in eight people who give birth experience it. While postpartum psychosis, it's pretty rare about one to two people per 1,000 births. And that's kind of a distinction that's been lost in this case. Where maybe, hopefully, very well-intended commentators out there of other mothers or other parents who are saying things like, well, I had postpartum depression really bad and I would never harm my children. I don't know if it's necessarily helpful or productive or perhaps even accurate input at this point. Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are completely different beasts, just very different. If you take the word postpartum out of it, it's like someone with depression saying that they never heard a voice that wasn't ever there. It's like, okay, well, that makes sense. And one would also imagine, because they're so different, that no one could ever mistake postpartum psychosis as postpartum depression. But that's not the case. Because people with postpartum psychosis also do have symptoms of postpartum depression. And from the outside, it could look like they just have postpartum depression, but the psychotic part is usually intermittent and hidden. Hidden meaning it only presents itself for perhaps a small window. Patients can have prolonged, lucid periods where they're not really in a state of psychosis. And to, I mean, what are the odds that that times up when you see a provider, when you're talking to your therapist or your psychiatrist? There's also no standardized tool to capture postpartum psychosis. There's standardized tools to capture postpartum anxiety and depression, but not psychosis. One person on Reddit years ago writes, I spent a lot of time scouring the internet for PPP, postpartum psychosis stories that match my own. I don't fall into the category of the most typical presentation of it.

So a lot of times people will hallucinate that there's a lot of religious hallucinations that the devil is coming for their baby.

One mom wrote, they believed that their husband was the second coming of Christ.

The only way for that prophecy to be fulfilled was if their child died, but it would be okay because the husband would bring the child back.

Then they were saying a lot of the things that they were seeing online, just kind of fed into this like second coming narrative. Now, some of these people are not even that religious before they entered into postpartum psychosis, but she says, I didn't hallucinate that the devil was coming for my baby. I didn't even hallucinate that my husband wanted to kidnap him, which is another common thing is like someone wants to kidnap your baby, and you're the only one that can protect them. She says, it was more subtle, like something growing in my lungs. I knew I couldn't breathe as easily, but I adapted as I went because I couldn't quite identify what was wrong. I lost myself, I fell into a deep depression. She says, once that depression hit, the intrusive like weird thoughts started coming. She says, it started off just as thoughts, intrusive, scary thoughts. So this is where it gets even more confusing. When she says that she falls into a deep depression, when she sees a psychiatrist, that could present itself clinically as just postpartum depression. Then she starts having intrusive thoughts. There's also something called postpartum OCD, where it is someone who just gave birth, and a lot of these people, they have a hard time even coming to providers for it because they're scared their baby is going to be taken away.

There is one woman who says that she had to, every time she went up and down the stairs, she had to sit on her butt and scoot from one step at a time because she had this intrusive visual that she would chuck her baby down the stairs. She didn't want to chuck her baby down the stairs, but she's almost like, why do I keep thinking this thought unless I secretly must want it, which is actually a huge thing with people who have regular OCD, not postpartum OCD, they think their intrusive thoughts are some sort of reflection of their deepest wants and desires, but that was her postpartum version of it. She's like, if I don't want to actually chuck my baby down the stairs, why do I keep thinking about chucking my baby down the stairs?