Postpartum Depression: Is It Mood Disorder or Medical Condition?
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PROFESSIONAL ISSUES
Postpartum Depression: Is It Mood Disorder or Medical Condition? Peggy Walker
Received: 10 October 2011 / Accepted: 16 November 2011 / Published online: 3 December 2011 # National Society of Genetic Counselors, Inc. 2011
Keywords Postpartum depression . Genetic counseling
As first-year genetic counseling students, we were assigned to visit a community support group meeting related to prenatal genetic counseling. I chose the Postpartum Depression Support Group for no significant reason other than mental health issues had always puzzled me. I had experienced two unsettling incidents years before with young people in our small town who had committed suicide. Others told me that they had shown signs of depression. Born an optimist and raised to say “Fine!” whenever someone asked me how I was, I could not figure out why a person would take her/his own life. Couldn’t she just “be tough” and get over whatever was bothering her? But these two people, a teenage male neighbor and a young woman from my church, were too close to me to ignore the pain I remembered seeing in their eyes, and then the greater pain I sensed in their family members after their losses. The Support Group was small, just a few women attending over lunch. They told me the group had previously included a number of other women who had “fought back their demons” and were doing well, so they rarely came back. A registered nurse who had experienced postpartum depression was the volunteer leader of the group, and they all had become friends due to their common mental health experiences. I was an outsider, I
P. Walker (*) Division of Clinical Genetics and Molecular Medicine, University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Two Medical Park, Suite 208, Columbia, SC 29203, USA e-mail: [email protected]
had never experienced anything but the “baby blues,” and yet they accepted me and talked with me frankly about their experiences. Some of the stories they related were very scary to me—crying all the way home from the hospital and not being able to stop crying for 3 weeks; thoughts about harming themselves or their babies; so tired they could barely get out of bed to care for their newborns or make coffee for their husbands; making threatening plans in their heads and then feeling guilty about having those thoughts; obsessing about ways to end their sadness. After the first meeting, as shocked as I was about what I heard, I still thought, “Why couldn’t they just shake it off like other women did?” Before the next month’s meeting, I pulled some journal articles and started reading about depression and particularly postpartum depression. What I read helped me better understand their feelings. They were so kind and so normal; who would think that these women had a mental health issue? The moment that Kate (not her real name) talked to the group about feeling numb and not hearing her baby crying when her husband came home after work was the moment I realized she could not help herself. She did not know how long her baby had been crying
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