I had planned for a calming water birth and, throughout my pregnancy, which was for the most part a happy and healthy pregnancy, I saw no reason why this couldn’t happen. However, things didn’t go to plan, and my labour ended up being incredibly exhausting and traumatic.

My little boy, Alfie, was very much wanted and, like all mums, I was excited to meet my baby. Sadly, however, at week 20 of my pregnancy, we suffered an unexpected family bereavement, my pregnancy became high risk due to a fibroid and my blood pressure began to increase. I went into a natural labour at 41 weeks but had pre-eclampsia and, after two hours of pushing, my baby’s heart rate kept dropping due to the cord around his neck. I was quickly prepped for an emergency c section.

The birth

Thankfully, they managed to deliver my little boy via forceps, but I lost a lot of blood and became anaemic and I was hooked up to monitors throughout. Alfie was eventually delivered, a little bruised but thankfully healthy, at 14.15, and, because I’d gone into labour at 23.00 the night before I was completely exhausted. Alfie was extremely sleepy, not waking to feed in the first 24 hours, but I was assured that this was normal for a forceps birth.

I was concerned that I wasn’t making very much milk and Alfie seemed jittery and a bit yellow, but I was discharged anyway after two nights – only to be readmitted the next day. Alfie had jaundice and had lost 11% body weight in just four days.

At this point they acknowledged my poor milk supply may have been due to anaemia, however, to me it felt as though nobody had been listening when I raised my concerns and this led to me not trusting any of the health professionals (despite my husband and I both being health professionals ourselves). Worse still, I didn’t trust my own instincts as a mother.

Three days later I was discharged again and the midwives were coming to check my blood pressure every two days, while the health visitors were coming several times a week. As the home checks mounted up, it felt as though every visit highlighted my incompetence as a mother and my self doubts and anxiety spiralled out of control.

My symptoms of postpartum psychosis

It all began as the worst anxiety I’ve ever experienced and developed into mania. Before long I had lost all concept of time and of what was real and what was not. I stopped sleeping, showering and eating and went to see the GP. By this point I believed that everyone around me was a doll, I was unable to follow storylines on TV, I couldn’t keep up with conversations and I couldn’t retain information. In retrospect the GP was amazing and immediately referred me to the perinatal mental health team. However, at the time, I believed they were trying to put me in prison, I thought everyone at the surgery was a social worker and that nobody trusted me to be around children. I didn’t feel able to tell anyone this as I thought everyone was in on the plot.

When I got home I refused to take the medication I was given as I believed it was poison that they were using to try and knock me out to get me to prison. I was hearing police helicopters outside and thought my house was full of cameras recording my actions. I paced constantly that night as my husband and baby were sleeping in the lounge (to allow me to try and get some sleep), and I kept thinking my husband was planning to leave and take the baby with him.

The perinatal mental health team came the next morning but unfortunately I had a nurse who was new to her role and she wrongly diagnosed me with postnatal depression. Luckily, my husband is a paramedic and he strongly suspected I had been misdiagnosed so he continued to seek more help.

My behaviour spiralled further out of control that day and, while my parents were caring for our baby, I woke my husband up from a nap to tell him that everyone was dead. He called the nurse back and I was sectioned and admitted to a Mother and Baby Unit (MBU) that night.

My admission to an MBU

When I got to the MBU I thought I’d been locked in prison and I refused to eat, drink, sleep, shower and take medications. I spent all my time pacing the unit trying to find a way out. As I was admitted at night no one was around and I believed they’d locked me up on my own because I was such a bad mum and a danger to others. I thought everyone was an actor and my hallucinations made them appear to have really strange eyes. I also started to believe that my husband was an undercover policeman. I spent hours looking at the photos of the staff on the wall thinking they were somehow linked to my normal life and that they’d all been undercover.

The turning point was two days later when they injected me with antipsychotics. At the time I thought this injection had aborted my baby and sterilised me. I’d also lost 10kg by then as I thought all food and drink smelled and tasted weird and was poison, and I had been told I might need to be moved to a different hospital to be tube fed. I’m a Dietitian by profession so I knew what this meant but at the time I couldn’t take it in. I kept asking the same questions over and over. I swapped between thinking Alfie was a doll and they’d taken away the real baby, to thinking that he wasn’t my baby at all or sometimes even believing that he had died. Because I’d had an epidural when I was in labour I hadn’t felt him be born and this was something I became obsessed with and was talking about as if it was evidence that he wasn’t mine. I thought the TV was talking about me and telling me things like I’d lost my career and would never work again and I believed that the songs on the radio were played especially for me. My husband bought me a magazine and it felt like everyone in it was pregnant and they were taunting me as I could never have a baby (thinking I had been sterilised). I wouldn’t use my phone as I thought it had been intercepted by the police and at first I thought I couldn’t even phone my husband as I wrongly believed he had asked for no contact, despite him visiting and spending most of the day with me every day.

The road to recovery

I eventually started taking medication willingly and began to recover. The first time I was allowed for a walk on the beach with a member of staff and my husband I was so excited but I still had some paranoid thoughts, thinking that everyone was an actor and that if I went into the public toilet they would run away with my son while I was there. But these delusions began to subside.

I was on the MBU for two weeks and think I should have probably been there longer but I was able to convince everyone I was fully recovered -  Coronavirus had made an appearance and I was very aware that lockdown was coming and I wanted to get home before it did. Lockdown in fact happened just a week after I was discharged.

The mental health team reviewed me over the phone and I never disclosed how down I was feeling as I feared they would re-admit me and I wouldn’t be able to have visitors. I really struggled and did not want to get out of bed, leaving my husband doing a lot of the caring for our son. I didn’t feel a connection with Alfie at this point and felt awful that this magical bond hadn’t appeared. I knew I loved him but I was scared that he would never be able to love me.

Another major turning point came six months later when the GP treated me for an under active thyroid and I finally started to feel like me again. It was the final piece in my treatment jigsaw and really made a big difference.

I now have the best bond with my son and he is a complete mummy’s boy! I still feel sad and guilty about the time I feel I missed out on as I felt like I was living in a fog, but I’m so glad what we went through hasn’t seemed to affect him and he is a happy, healthy boy.

One mum shares her story of recovery to inspire hope...

If you were to ask my best friend a word to describe me, she will for sure say ‘anxious’. It’s a part of me that I’ve always carried and of course it showed up during my pregnancy too. I kept thinking ‘is the baby ok?’ ‘is the baby moving?’ But overall, everything was going fine…that is until the end of February 2020 when COVID-19 starting spreading across Europe. For me, being pregnant and away from home meant only one thing; there was no way my family would be able to be with me for this amazing moment in my life.

At 41 weeks of pregnancy, on 27^th May, my little boy decided to make an appearance. I read a lot about people giving birth after pushing for ten minutes or an hour, but that was not the case for me. I don’t want to go into all the details of my birth, but to summarise we had a fair few complications and I felt completely traumatised by the end of the labour.

The days in the maternity ward proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. I was in a foreign country with no knowledge of the standard hospital procedures, and this unfortunately created lots of unnecessary confusion and uncertainty. Nonetheless, the biggest challenge was taking care of the little one as I had never held in my hands such a tiny and precious human being.

My little baby decided to show his character from the beginning: he didn’t want to be forced in doing something he didn’t want to do (like his mum), which sadly included breastfeeding. We tried for a week to get him to latch, but he was crying so much that the whole process made me really really upset. Breastfeeding was not going to work and that left me feeling really guilty - I felt that I was not able to do the one thing I was supposed to do as a mum. I felt like a failure. It was only after months that I realised that a fed baby is a happy baby regardless of how they feed, and that a mum simply needs to be loving. The rest didn’t matter – I was doing my best.

After five days in hospital, it was time to go home. Unfortunately, after five days of very little sleep in hospital, I realised that the situation wasn’t going to improve at home either and I was exhausted.

I had a terrible feeling of doom, and I thought I was dying

On the first day back, the midwife came to check on the little one and, despite assuring me that we were doing everything correctly, my anxiety didn’t leave me. I ended up having a major panic attack and I feel that, looking back, this is when the psychosis also began.

During the panic attack, I had a terrible feeling of doom, and I thought I was dying. It felt as though my entire body was shaking despite my legs remaining completely still as stone when I looked at them. An ambulance came and I was taken to A&E. I spent a few hours there and everything seemed fine; they discharged me and suggested I get in contact with a perinatal mental health team. Little did they know that they would see me again in less than 24 hours…

Once I arrived back home after the first trip to A&E, things started quickly deteriorating. I really wanted to sleep but I wasn’t able to close my eyes. I began feeling that everything around me was unreal. My husband took me on a walk to show me that everything was just as it always had been, nothing outside had changed, but it didn’t convince me. My mind wouldn’t stop racing and at one point I convinced myself that I was in a coma – perhaps from the panic attack or from the birth – I wasn’t sure I just felt as though I was in another state and that the doctors were trying to communicate with me through computer simulation.

My head was spinning and I kept thinking I needed to pass levels – as though I was in a computer simulation - in order to stop certain situations playing over and over in my mind. It was only when a friend came to visit that she realised something was very wrong and a second ambulance was called resulting in another trip to A&E.

We spent 24 hours in A&E but the situation kept worsening. I was highly paranoid and kept repeating: Is the baby fine? Am I fine? Are we going to be ok? Why me? I was also really worried that I could have harmed my baby as I was not able to take care of him properly.

During this time, I truly convinced myself that I was indeed in a computer simulation. It also became clear that I was having hallucinations. It was as though I was projecting my feelings onto other people’s faces and I thought I could see my husband and the doctor crying, but when I asked them about it the tears suddenly vanished and their faces returned to normal.

It was at this point that another doctor came into the room and diagnosed me with postpartum psychosis.

I wasn’t scared of the diagnosis – I hadn’t heard of it so the name of the illness didn’t mean anything to me. But I was terrified by what I was experiencing and I just wanted it to stop. As things continued to deteriorate fast they made the decision to section me in a Mother and Baby Unit (MBU) which ultimately saved my life.

I had never heard of an MBU and I am not sure they actually exist in my home country.

MBU’s are psychiatric hospitals for mothers like me experiencing severe mental illness. They are a place you can recover keeping the baby with you the entire time. These are amazing places and the doctors that work in there are fantastic people; I cannot praise them enough.

The first day in the MBU was hard as I was still convinced I needed to reach my next level in the computer simulation, and that to do so would save me from being trapped in a coma. A doctor came to explain to me that I was experiencing psychosis and that I would need to begin taking special medications that same evening.

Both the medicine and the ability to sleep for an entire night helped enormously in my recovery. Indeed, the day after, I had a short psychotic episode but it lasted only 10 minutes…and I’ve never had once since then!

Time flew by in the MBU: I gained confidence with my baby and I also met some lovely mum friends, all of who were clearly experiencing their own battles (I wish them all the luck for the future).

My recovery went so well that I was discharged within three weeks, followed by home support from the perinatal mental health team. Coming home was scary and daunting but my husband and my family where there to support me (luckily my family managed to find a flight to reach me). I had ups and down at the beginning. I felt ashamed, sad about my illness and devastated about not being able to breastfeed. Nonetheless, I had my baby there with me and we had a beautiful bond. Everyday I was showing myself that I was in fact able to take care of that little human being and that really boosted my confidence. He was smiling and happy and that was all mattered to me.

After a few months had passed since my discharge from the MBU, the medication was stopped and I am happy to say that I am back to being the old me (and actually less anxious, which is better than before!) This month is going to be my baby’s 1^st birthday and life couldn’t be better!

I wanted to share my story to show that postpartum psychosis is indeed a severe mental illness but you can recover very quickly with the right help. Reach out for help and, although you might think you’ll never be your old self again, that really isn’t the case. You will recover. There is help. Stay strong.

I was living abroad when I became unwell with postpartum psychosis. I had left friends and family behind in the UK and moved to Brazil to get married to a Brazilian I met while teaching there a few years previously. When I became pregnant, however, I did toy with the idea of having the baby in England, but it just wasn’t practical to come back at the time.

Of course, I knew that giving birth and looking after a baby would be hard work, but I had no idea of the scale and intensity of what was to follow...

84% of women in Brazil have C-sections and I was determined to have a natural birth. However, my baby’s heart rate dropped when I was being monitored in hospital and I ended up being rushed for an emergency caesarean.

At that point, everything was fine and I was sent home. However, after about three weeks I developed a fever and had a pain in my stomach. I had it checked out and, through CT scans, they found that they’d left a swab inside me. The language barrier made all of these conversations quite challenging, but one thing I was told by the doctor from the first c-section was that I nearly died due to loss of blood. This added to the confusion and paranoia of who to trust.

This is when things became really confusing for me. I was convinced that, because I’d had two operations, I must have had two babies. In Portuguese, they don’t pronounce Seth, my baby’s name, in the same we that we do in England. Instead they say ‘Sete’ (pronounced ‘Seche’) and it reinforced the idea that I’d given birth twice, that there were two different babies.

I became really anxious and paranoid, and I had a really heightened sense of smell, believing that I could tell which nurse was coming to see me just from the smell in the air.

After leaving hospital for the second time, I kept believing things were happening that weren’t real. We got on the bus in the middle of summer and I was absolutely convinced that I was bleeding everywhere – but I wasn’t bleeding at all. And when one of the drivers came to look at Seth in the pram I was convinced they were staring because I was pushing a pram around with no baby in – I truly believed at that point that Seth had died.

Other delusions included my mistrust of my husband, who I was convinced had installed cameras everywhere, and I stopped eating because I thought that lots of different foods were causing colic. I remember my husband trying to put me in a sleeveless summer dress too and I became really agitated, convinced that he was strapping me into a straitjacket.

I tried to find places or activities that might help to calm me. For example, there’s a saying in Portuguese – banho de sal grosso – which means cleansing yourself in saltwater. So I decided that if I went to the sea it would cleanse me and make me feel better and stop all of the fear and anxiety. So we kept going to the beach one time when I went in the water with my husband I thought I was dying.

I continued to be really concerned about Seth’s wellbeing too. At one point, I thought he was the devil and that he needed to be exorcised to save him – even though I wasn’t actually religious in any way.

As things became worse, we went to see a psychiatrist but, due to the difference in language and my complete confusion, I struggled to get across how I was feeling. They tried to sedate me but then just sent me on my way with six months’ antidepressants in my pocket.

I felt confused, frightened and as though I had no real medical support. To add to that, I was back at work when Seth was just four months old because you only get four months’ maternity leave in Brazil. By that point the psychotic symptoms were petering out (they lasted around two weeks in total), but I had really bad anxiety and depression – in fact, the anxiety stayed with me for over a year after giving birth. Because Seth was so young when I returned to work, I had to have him with me in the classroom where I was teaching English and try to use my hour a day for breastfeeding as effectively as I could.

It was such a challenging time and, feeling alone, I decided to do some of my own research. I started googling postnatal depression but it just didn’t sound at all like my experience. However, luckily, I stumbled across a website about postpartum psychosis and realised that I had all the symptoms. Upon further research, I found the Action on Postpartum Psychosis (APP) peer support forum which felt as though it was the only knowledgeable support that was out there – after all, my doctors hadn’t mentioned psychosis.

Reaching out to people on the forum was a lifeline – it was here that I found other women who had been through what I had. The first woman who responded to me really helped me and we are still in touch to this day. There was no judgment on the forum, no language barriers and I felt free to speak openly about what had happened to me and what I was going through.

We came back to England when Seth was nine months old and I saw some doctors over here who confirmed my diagnosis. As I started to make sense of my experiences, I decided to train to become a peer support worker with APP because I couldn’t bear the idea of another woman going through what I went through with no knowledgeable support.

I honestly don’t think I would be where I am today if it wasn’t for the voluntary peer support that I received. There’s a lot of stigma around psychosis, particularly around PP where people have these ideas that mothers want to harm their babies, but it really wasn’t like that. If anything, I was terrified of something happening to my baby. I was over-protective.

Everybody’s experience of PP and subsequent recovery is unique to them, but there are shared similarities between us and that means the world. It stops you feeling so lonely and ashamed.

Through APP I feel that I have found my tribe – these amazing women who have been through such intense struggles, but who are united in joining forces to help others. And while NHS support often has time restrictions placed on it, peer support is there forever. I’m so grateful to benefit from and, today, play a part in that much-needed service.

There’s a Korean tradition that when a baby is born, mother and baby stay home for the first 21 days. The first 100 days are considered a vulnerable time, and so we are meant to be cautious. It’s a belief rooted in keeping mothers and babies safe from harm, but in modern life, it’s a difficult tradition to follow. For me, it felt impractical and unreasonable, and I spent the first days out of the hospital inviting friends to our home and going out to restaurants and parks. We even decided to travel to the US when my son was two months old on an extended trip to visit family and friends. However, in the back of my mind, I would remember this tradition of confinement, and it was a decision I would question when I was eventually diagnosed with stress-induced postpartum psychosis.

I cannot link my postpartum psychosis to tradition or culture, I’ve learned from this experience that postpartum psychosis can happen to anyone, and I can trace the roots of my psychosis to something that started well before my decision to make this trip.

My psychosis started while I was in the United States, I’d wanted to introduce Cato to family on the West and East Coasts, and to celebrate his 100 days with family and friends.

It was towards the end of our trip, while I was staying with my in-laws that the symptoms of psychosis started. I hadn’t been sleeping for weeks, and the stress of travel and concerns from our families had taken its toll. I did not realise that what I was experiencing were symptoms of postpartum psychosis. I’d become paranoid, believing that my mother-in-law was signalling to me in a language separate from the others in the family. The house had Nest cameras installed for security, but I thought I could hear the cameras in the walls, I thought I was being watched. The warnings and concerns expressed kindly by my in-laws took on a darker meaning, I felt increasingly worried, and I could not sleep. It culminated in a moment when I looked at my son’s face, and his face was not his own, but the face of a devil.

I did not know what was happening. The moment felt too surreal to believe, but it felt so real to me. I did not understand. I knew that I needed to leave the family home, I had a sense that something very bad was about to happen, I just didn’t know what. I begged James, my husband to take us to a hotel, and he immediately packed our bags, and we left.

At the hotel, things descended quickly. I thought we were being tracked, and so I deleted all the apps on my phone. I started to see figures in the halls, people with strange faces staring at me, brushing past me. And my son’s eyes were still like the eyes of a devil. In the hotel, my husband tried to get me to sleep, but I couldn’t. I started losing sense of time, each moment was replicated a multitude of times. I thought I heard the voice of God, telling me that I was in hell, that my life had been a simulation, and that my son was going to die.

In some ways, it felt like a relief to hear this, it seemed to make sense, everything I’d been experiencing, all the stories of my past, of my family’s histories, I could see the patterns in them. I didn’t tell my husband what I ‘knew’, because I didn’t want to frighten him. He could tell that I wasn’t well, and so he asked his parents to come take our son, and then he drove me to the emergency room.

At the hospital, I lost all sense of what was real and not real. I started tearing off my clothes in the waiting room, I was attacking the nurses, they looked like demons. I remember hearing my husband shouting for help and being forced onto a gurney.

The next days are fragmented. I was given different medications, but nothing was working, and I still couldn’t sleep. I didn’t sleep for four days. I lost all sense of who I was, I thought I was my husband, my son, sometimes I was my mother. I remembered different versions of my life, versions that couldn’t be true. My husband would call my parents to come and help take care of me, but I didn’t recognise them. I thought that one of the nurses was the angel Gabriel, and I couldn’t eat because I thought the food I was being given was human flesh. There were times I remembered I had a son, that I knew who I was, but most of the time, I was terrified.

I would experience what I thought was the end of days

After four days, the decision was made that I would be sectioned to a general psychiatric ward. I was transferred via ambulance, and I remember thinking that the medics taking me were taking me to be euthanized. I am still grateful to the medic who held my hand the entire way, while I talked nonsensically and screamed at the animals surrounding us.

At the psychiatric ward, I would experience what I thought was the end of days – it was partly in reaction to the roughness of the staff who were trying to calm me, but it ended with me stripping off my clothes and urinating on the floor. I was sedated, and for the first time, I slept. I do not know how long I slept, I think it was for two days, but I woke up in a blank room with my hair tied in a strange way, with fragmented memories of who I was and what had happened. I spent eight days in the psychiatric ward, following instructions, attending the classes and waiting desperately to be released.

I was released to the care of my husband. I felt like myself, but I know now that I still wasn’t well. My time away from my son had taken its toll – I felt completely separated from him, and I had no memory of my bond with him. It felt physically painful to touch him. When I thought about it later, I would believe that this was my mind’s way of protecting him, of protecting him from a mother who could not be trusted.

We would return to London, where I was referred to the perinatal mental health team. A few weeks after psychosis, I would fall into a deep, clinical depression. It happened suddenly, where one morning I woke up, but I couldn’t move or get out of bed. Those months were some of the most difficult times of the experience. It felt unending, and I felt despair, because I couldn’t imagine being well again.

My husband made the decision to keep me at home instead of admitting me to a mother baby unit. One day when I was feeling too much pain to lift a spoon, my husband called my psychiatrist, and she referred me to the mental health crisis team. The crisis team would visit our flat every morning. Each visit forced me to get out of bed, and they would give me a task for the day. I started keeping lists of simple tasks – making a cup of tea, brushing my hair. They would smile at me, even as I sat unmoving and silent, unable to speak. They promised me that I would feel better, that one day this would be a memory. I tried desperately to believe them.

They asked me to spend time with Cato each day, to help rebuild our bond. I would do this as a practice, and I didn’t understand how I couldn’t feel a connection to my own son.

I would remain on an antipsychotic and antidepressant for a year. It was several months before I could start noticing moments of light. I would be sitting and realise I wasn’t feeling pain, that I was noticing the colours around me, and I would know that I was getting better. Those moments would be temporary, and then the darkness would come again, but eventually the darkness would come less frequently, and I would feel I’d reclaimed myself.

The bond with my son took longer to build. I approached it with intention. I went through the steps, and I hoped he would understand that I was working to come back to him, that I was trying to remember.

And one day I did remember him. I was holding him and feeling his weight against my body, and it felt familiar. And I felt like a mother again.

For more of Catherine’s story, you can read her memoir, Inferno, which is out now in hardback and paperback from Bloomsbury. You can also watch this moving film that Catherine recorded in March for the Maternal Mental Health Alliance.