Postpartum psychosis that appeared two weeks after giving birth… The story of a 35-year-old woman who suffered from hallucinations that someone was trying to steal her family away and tried to kill her husband and daughter, thinking that they were all dead, is revealed
A woman with no mental health issues has been reported to have suffered a psychotic episode two weeks after giving birth and attempted to kill her family.
According to a recent report in the British daily The Sun, 35-year-old Laura from Chesterfield, Derbyshire, was diagnosed with postnatal psychosis two weeks after giving birth to her daughter Olivia. Laura began to hallucinate, feeling as if someone was trying to take her family away.
Laura, who shared her story in the UK’s Channel 4 documentary Losing It: Our Mental Health Emergency, revealed that she experienced hallucinations in the days after giving birth in 2019. Laura said she began to feel more aggressive and resentful of her partner before almost killing her husband Dan, 33.
Laura’s first hallucination was of her newborn daughter Olivia being molested and thrown around. Laura confessed, “I had this dream three times and I didn’t want to go to bed. More than anything, I was having a hard time sleeping and I resented my husband for sleeping soundly. Then I started to be aggressive toward him.”
On a day when she had been awake for 40 hours, lost in all sorts of thoughts and fantasies, Laura had a severe hallucination while driving to her friend’s house. While Dan was driving, Laura thought he was falling asleep at the wheel. She thought he was blinking more often and longer than usual.
Laura stopped the car and said she would drive. Laura got behind the wheel and became emotional. She suddenly felt angry that her husband was not comforting her. The hallucinations continued. Her delusions that someone was trying to take one of her family members became more severe. Laura decided that the only way to keep them all together was to die together, thinking that she could not lose her family.
Laura started driving hard. She wanted to hit the wall and kill everyone. She was trying to kill them by crashing the car. Her husband Dan, who was terrified by Laura’s driving, shouted at her from the side, “Please stop! Stop! Our daughter needs a future! Please stop!” Before she hit the wall, Dan pressed the car start button repeatedly from the side. When the car stopped, which almost caused a crash, Dan got his daughter Olivia and his wife out.
Fortunately, Laura was not seriously injured, but was rushed to A&E. She was treated for six weeks by the Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust’s perinatal team. She was given the antipsychotic drug haloperidol and monitored closely until she recovered.
Postpartum psychosis is characterized by hallucinations and delusions, and there is a high risk of taking one’s own life or killing one’s child. It should be treated as an emergency.
Postpartum psychosis, which Laura experienced, is a serious mental health condition that occurs in 1 out of 1,000 new mothers. While it is common to experience ‘postpartum depression (baby blues)’ after giving birth, postpartum psychosis is different. It should be treated as an emergency because it can put you at risk of harming your family and yourself.
In fact, 0.1% of all mothers harm their babies or take their own lives. In Korea, there have been shocking cases of postpartum psychosis causing babies to die. According to a 2005 survey published in the Journal of the Korean Pediatrics Society, 4% of postpartum psychosis patients killed their own children and 5% took their own lives.
Postpartum psychosis is clearly different from postpartum depression. The main symptoms are accompanied by schizophrenia such as delusions and hallucinations, or take the form of bipolar disorder. For example, this includes cases where the patient feels confused and very anxious, feels that a god or an external force is controlling them, reveals a false belief that their child is deformed, and complains of delusions and hallucinations that the child should be killed.
The exact cause is not yet known, but women with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or a family history of mental illness are at greater risk. In fact, women with a history of bipolar disorder had up to a 35% increased risk of developing postpartum psychosis, and women with a history of postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis had a nearly 50% increased risk of recurrence of postpartum psychosis.
Common symptoms of postpartum psychosis include:hallucination=A state of hearing, seeing, smelling, or feeling something that does not exist△oblivion= Suspicions, fears, thoughts or beliefs that are unlikely to be true △Mania= Feeling very ‘high’ or acting out excessively, such as talking or thinking too much or too fast, fidgeting, or losing normal inhibitions △blues= Showing signs of depression, such as feeling withdrawn or tearful, lacking energy, loss of appetite, anxiety, agitation, or trouble sleeping.
Sometimes, there is a mixture of mania and depression, showing a pattern of rapid mood swings. These symptoms, such as hallucinations, delusions, mania, low mood, and feeling very confused, usually occur within the first two weeks to three months after giving birth.
Source: kormedi.com
