The Secret Anxiety One In Five Mothers Face
More and more Australian women are being diagnosed with peri-natal anxiety. And yet too few can recognise the symptoms.
PRIMER 2020
On a warm spring day in 2017, 32-year-old Sam Todd was standing in the kitchen of her Ballarat home in country Victoria when she realised she could no longer maintain the facade she had so carefully cultivated.
Three months earlier, she'd given birth to her second daughter, Heidi, a contented baby who slept well and fed beautifully. Sam knew she’d been lucky with Heidi. But she didn’t feel lucky. She felt exhausted and broken.
That day, her husband Josh, an accountant, had stopped at home to have lunch. The children were both - miraculously - asleep, but when Josh got up to clear his plate and head back to the office, Sam stopped him. “You can’t go,” she said, her face stricken.
“Why not?” he replied, puzzled.
The words fell out before Sam could stop them. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
It took a moment for Josh to understand what his wife was saying, but once he did, things moved quickly. He called the Perinatal Anxiety & Depression Australia (PANDA) helpline. A crisis team was sent out, and, within days, Sam was admitted to the local mother and baby unit, where she spent two weeks, before being released with a comprehensive mental health plan and medication.
Now Sam can see that the darkness she felt that afternoon marked the lowest point of a descent into peri-natal anxiety that had been building for years - ever since the panic attacks that came while she was pregnant with her first child, Natalie. “My heart would beat really fast," she says. "I’d feel dizzy and I couldn’t think straight. I was out of control.”
Post-natal depression is not new, but it’s only relatively recently that peri-natal anxiety – that is, moderate to severe anxiety during pregnancy or in the first year after childbirth – has been recognised as a distinct illness, with different symptoms and behaviour. Where post-natal depression tends to be characterised by low mood, post-natal anxiety is almost the opposite, causing women to feel“hyper-vigilant, and unable to rest,” says PANDA CEO Terri Smith.
Most women would agree that a certain amount of anxiety during pregnancy and post-birth comes with the territory, but peri-natal anxiety is something else. “It was really scary,” says Sam, whose anxiety manifested as an obsessive concern with Natalie’s development, her own inability to breastfeed and countless other issues. While counselling helped, these thought patterns returned full-force with Heidi’s birth, until Sam felt depleted, depressed and eventually, suicidal.
Today it’s estimated that one in five new mothers will suffer anxiety or depression during the perinatal period — a staggering figure when you consider that there are 300,000 births across Australia each year.
But perhaps it shouldn't be surprising. After all, the women now entering motherhood are millennials (the 20- and 30-somethings born between the late ‘70s and ‘90s) who are widely recognised as the most anxious generation in history. To top it off, motherhood is, by many accounts, more pressurised than ever.