Australian health professional Ariane Beeston has written a book about her experience with postpartum psychosis. Photo: supplied by Black Inc Books
Ariane Beeston was walking her son in his buggy when she looked down and it wasn’t a baby she saw.
“I was walking home from work, pushing the pram, and Henry had turned into a dragon. I was hallucinating. At that time it was actually more a return of those psychotic symptoms I had experienced those hallucinations when he was much younger,” she tells Nine to Noon's Kathryn Ryan.
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“I had returned to work, I had convinced my psychiatrist that going back to work would be good for my recovery that it would help me to feel more competent and help me to feel myself again.
“… it was a real relapse, a real wake-up call that I wasn’t actually recovered, I wasn’t well.
“I had this real strange sensation of my hands and my fingers not belonging to me, just a very, very distressing almost disembodied.”
Beeston was in her 20s, working as a psychologist with the NSW department of communities and justice when she took a break to have her first child.
“[It was] very, very stressful, intense work … it sort of lay some of the foundations what then transpired for me postpartum in terms of my psychotic illness … there were elements of particular cases I had worked on that featured later on.”
Beeston has written a book about her experience of postpartum psychosis, Because I'm Not Myself, You See.
Beeston’s career began at the child protection healthline in Australia, taking calls from nurses and doctors and teachers as well as members of the community about children at risk of harm. She went on to become a frontline case worker – investigating cases and, if need be, removing children from unsafe environments.
Her book opens with a story about nappy rash. Not at all uncommon in babies, but for Beeston, a real trigger.
“I drew that link that I had been involved in bringing children into care - sometimes they had nappy rash, sometimes they had headlice, and that particular feature just stuck in my mind and I became convinced that the department was coming to remove my baby because of the nappy rash,” she says.
Postpartum psychosis affects 1-to-2 in every 1000 new mothers in Australia, and each experience is unique, Beeston says. That’s about 600 women a year in Australia. It should be considered a psychiatric emergency, but it’s not always picked up. Symptoms can be subtle, as was Beeston’s case.
“I was a mental health professional, with a mental illness so that was an extra layer of stigma for me.
“I was worried about if I was too honest about just how bad things are will that mean that my registration will be taken away? That I won’t be able practise? What will my colleagues think of me? Will I be able to work again?”
While Beeston’s experience was extreme, her book sheds light on the range of conditions women can experience after birth.
“So many of us expect that rush of love, that love at first sight, that movie moment. And it can be really, really distressing when women first hold their baby and they don’t feel that,” she says.
“There’s that expectation that motherhood will come naturally, that it’s instinctive … and if you then don’t feel that, you’re failing.”
Many women experience chronic sleeplessness, trouble breastfeeding, changes to relationships. And nearly all women will have “intrusive thoughts,” she says.
“Almost all women, 80 to 100 per cent of women, will experience an intrusive thought of something happening to their baby.” That’s things like tripping downstairs and falling with your baby in your arms or being on a balcony and your baby falling over.
And 50 percent of women will experience intrusive thoughts of intentionally harming their baby.
“For these women it’s horrifying, it’s distressing, they have these thoughts and they don’t understand why. There is no evidence that having these thoughts is linked to actually carrying that out.”
Beeston completed two stints in a mother-baby unit at a psychiatric hospital in New South Wales where therapy, medication and specific perinatal support helped her heal.
“You need time to … process - to process the enormity of what happened… processing the grief of the time that I felt that I had lost to being so unwell and also my developing relationship with my baby.
“Once that love did break through, I felt completely smitten … falling in love with him, with my baby, really helped to get me through the recovery.”