We often hear about postpartum depression, but postpartum psychosis isn’t something often discussed.
Tony Pacitti from Rhode Island, USA, is one of the few who is opening up about what this is and how it can impact families. Tony is a father of twin boys and witnessed his wife, Sondra, spiral into postpartum psychosis after the birth of their twins.
Paranoia and hallucinations
The couple’s twins, Lorenzo and Max, were born during the height of the pandemic in April 2020 after four years of trying to fall pregnant. The pair were absolutely overjoyed and couldn’t wait to welcome their twins.
Sondra experienced a relatively smooth pregnancy until the end when her blood pressure began to climb. However, the boys were born healthy and Sondra remained in hospital for four days afterward.
After she was discharged, she felt unwell due to excessive swelling in her legs. Tony took her back to the hospital but as soon as she arrived, she began to act differently.
“She began to act paranoid about what her doctors were telling her, and she’d get stuck in weird conversational loops and sometimes speak nonsense. Fearing that something might be wrong, I found it harder to leave her bedside.
A week later, my wife experienced a 36-hour psychotic episode. I watched helplessly as she spiraled from paranoia to hallucinations to an hours-long bout of screaming every fear and regret I knew she held deep in her heart out into the world,” Tony wrote for Insider.
Sondra became deeply paranoid, would go days without sleep, hallucinated, and saw angels, all within a week of having our boys.”
Sondra was sent home a few days later with medication to keep her stable and strict orders to sleep. Tony explained how they did have a few good weeks together even though she wasn’t sleeping, as understandably so with newborn twins and very little outside help due to the pandemic.
However, when the boys were around 5 weeks old, Sondra began to disconnect again.
By the time the boys were six weeks old, Sondra’s psychosis had reemerged, more subtle and secretive. I knew she was keeping something big from me.”
While Sondra was active with a therapist and her mothers’ group, she wasn’t connecting with her family.
‘Believed something was wrong with them’
“She began to distrust her caregivers again, and now it extended to our sons. She believed in her bones that there was something wrong with them.
Nothing that I or our pediatrician told her, or even the two thriving babies in front of her, could change her mind,” he said.
Around two months after the birth of their sons, Sondra finally told Tony what she was feeling.
“One morning in June, after an hour of pleading with her, she spoke her unimaginable truth: “I’ve been thinking about killing myself”.”
Didn’t want to be a mum
Thankfully, Sondra was able to receive treatment at a facility in Providence. She was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis.
During that time, Tony and the children couldn’t visit her due to the pandemic but Tony was able to talk to her on the phone.
The only contact I had with her were brief phone calls, during which she never asked about our sons because she told me she didn’t love them and that she didn’t want to be a mum.
I knew that wasn’t true, that it was the psychosis talking, but she didn’t even believe she was experiencing psychosis.”
Tony went into single-dad mode as he took care of their twin boys and tried to enjoy every moment as they grew. However, often what he called ‘survivor’s guilt’ would sink in.
“Even the boundless love I felt for my boys was eclipsed by my fear for Sondra’s well-being and the uncertainty hanging over our family’s future.”
No choice but to trust him
After a few weeks, Sondra wasn’t getting any better. The medication wasn’t working for her so the doctors opted for electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).
Her doctor assured me that the procedure was nothing like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which only brought to mind all of the terrifying and stigmatized depictions of “shock treatment” that I knew from movies and that one Ramones song.
He also assured me that we were at the time for last resort, and while intense, ECT was effective in extreme cases such as Sondra’s. I had no choice but to trust him.”
For Sondra, ECT was the only way to overcome postpartum psychosis and it did work. After her third session, Tony noticed that she sounded like herself again on the phone. Not a voice filtered through psychosis.
However, the treatment working also meant that she lost her memories of her sons.
Everything from March of that year onward was gone. Four months of her life were redacted. She doesn’t remember being psychotic or suicidal, but she doesn’t remember holding her sons for the first time, either.”
After 40 days of in-house treatment, Sondra came home. Confused, tired, but herself.
“By the holidays, new memories finally started to stick. The memories she lost would never return, but we’ve talked extensively about what went on while she was away, and she knows that anytime she feels curious, I’m ready to recall what I can on demand,” Tony wrote.
Three years later, Tony admits that the experience still affects him.
“I watched her lose her mind, I heard her say she wanted to end her life, and I got a brief, bitter taste of a world without her. Along with the memory of the time she missed, I carry the fear that her psychosis might return at any moment,” he wrote.
Thankfully, Sonda remains herself and still doesn’t remember any of it. She also knows this one moment does not define her.
This is such an important reminder for every parent out there who may have experienced postpartum psychosis, depression, anxiety, or any other mental illness. This does not define you as a person or a parent. It is a mental illness, not a definition of yourself.
It’s stories like Sondra’s that remind us of this. Thank you, Tony, for sharing it.
Postpartum psychosis – what to watch for
According to Diana Jefferies, from the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University, 600 women in Australia will experience postpartum psychosis every year. Although most instances of postnatal psychosis are treatable, this mental illness can be ongoing.
Like Sondra, many of the women hit with postpartum psychosis will not understand what is happening to them. Why? Because this mental illness is often swept under the rug.
“Women don’t know what’s hit them,” Diana explains. “They say they don’t want to scare women. But women who experience this are already scared and they are not getting the help they need.”
According to the Royal Women’s Hospital, women who have postpartum psychosis may have a range of the following symptoms:
- confusion and disorientation, about the day and time and who people are
- concentration can be affected and your mind may feel foggy or that it is overloaded with too many thoughts
- severe physical anxiety or agitation, such that you cannot stay still
- variable mood, either on a high, irritable or depressed
- insomnia, feeling like you need less sleep and perhaps going days without sleeping
- delusions or thoughts that are not true and that are often paranoid – that the hospital staff are spies, that your partner is an imposter in disguise. These thoughts may seem bizarre or silly when you are well, but in the middle of the illness they can seem real
- hallucinations or impaired sensations where you either hear, see or smell things that are not present
- strange sensations that you are not really yourself and there are others controlling your actions and thoughts
- thoughts of and/or plans to harm yourself and your baby.
Where to get help
For mums experiencing something similar to Sondra, please remember that postnatal psychosis is not your fault. And it is not something to be ashamed of. Like for anxiety and depression, help is available.
Please, reach out and speak to someone about it.
