A friend of mine once likened childbirth to being in a car crash and then everybody expecting you to love the car. It’s a very fair point and one you don’t hear enough.
The myths surrounding new motherhood tend to dissolve on contact with the real thing. If you’re lucky, you adapt relatively seamlessly (if sleeplessly) to your new life and motor along happily thereafter. If you are unlucky, however, you do not.
Louis Theroux’s latest documentary for the BBC, Mothers on the Edge, told the stories of some of the women whose mental health fell apart in the wake of their babies’ births and who require care in specialised units to restore them to themselves and their families.
There are those like Barbara, who was brought to the mother-and-baby unit in London’s Bethlem Royal hospital after a suicide attempt while in the grip of postpartum psychosis. She explains to Theroux that, in fact, it is her husband who is suffering from psychosis, and that she was worried he might be the baby’s brother as well as father. She doesn’t think there is any way the unit can help her. Her husband listens patiently. He has been told that PPP patients usually make a full and relatively quick recovery. And so he waits for this stranger to leave and let his wife come back.
At the less acute but no less extreme end of the scale are those like Catherine, who was sectioned after a suicide attempt. She takes beautiful care of her baby, but feels no bond with him. Jake was born a year almost to the day after she and her husband terminated their first pregnancy when the foetus was found to have a rare form of Down’s syndrome. “Do you enjoy cuddling him?” asks Theroux. “No,” she says. “I think that’s why I took an overdose … because he deserves better than me – someone who can love him.” Catherine later goes missing from the unit and is found in a hotel having made another attempt – thankfully unsuccessful – to take her life.
Another mum, Lisa, is suffering from postnatal depression. Her husband describes how she took to her bed and stopped speaking or washing. Marie is devoted to her baby, but the trauma of birth has resurrected memories of a prior sexual assault, resulting in depression and anxiety.
It’s postpartum life writ large: a maelstrom of emotion; hormonal bombs breaking down self-protective barriers you have established over a lifetime; physical and psychical pain and fatigue. All of which combines to create, as a doctor puts it, a perfect storm for mental deterioration. The programme as a whole was a rare – possibly unprecedented, as I’m struggling to recall or find anything on the subject in the TV archives – and it’s a fascinating look at a woefully underexplored and under-recognised phenomenon.
What was almost equally fascinating, however, was Theroux’s response to his subjects – especially Catherine. Normally a model of the neutrally interested interviewer, pressing for information, occasionally offering thoughts and options but never imposing a narrative, here he struggled several times. “I think you do love him,” he said instantly to Catherine. More than once he tried to insist that not just her situation but her experiences were different to how she had described them. There was a hint of something anomalous to his responses – aggression, or outrage, or perhaps just panic – beneath the customary probing.
He did interrogate himself– though that might be too strong a word – briefly about this impulse. (“Part of me questioned if they were her real feelings. But I also wondered about my urge not to believe a woman could be indifferent to her own child.”) When the doctor tells him it is perfectly possible, Theroux looks as perturbed as we have ever seen him.
This is a measure of how fully we internalise beliefs about mothers and how tightly we hold to the expectations we are taught to have of motherhood. Lip service was paid to the notion that sociocultural influences contribute to the postpartum depression and anxiety of so many of the women in the units (and, it must be inferred, outside them). But it would have been good to investigate more fully the idea that when we collectively fetishise such things as “rushes of love” and “babymoons” and birth as a transcendental force, we are setting women up to fail, with all the mental consequences that can bring, so that Lisa, Barbara et al were set in a little more context. Not only would it have made for a more profound programme, but the slight sense of them being exotic animals displayed for our wonderment in a zoo would have been banished.
Barbara recovered fully by the end of the programme, and the sun seemed to be starting to break through the clouds for Catherine, too. Others were still waiting to wake up feeling better. Some cars hit harder than others, some at unluckier angles. Recovery can be a long road.
