and the research is now under review by the
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
Like Green, psychiatrist Nichole Fairbrother of
the University of British Columbia arrived at re-
search into perinatal mood disorders after uncov-
ering a gaping hole in the literature. Her career
path was defined by a thought that would have
petrified many new moms. After her son was born,
she remembers looking at his little hands, and
thinking how easy it would be to cut his fingers
off. “What would it be like to have a thought like
that if I didn’t know anything about [negative intru-
sive thoughts]?” she wondered. “It would be terri-
fying. In that moment I really needed to find out: Is
anybody studying this? Is this a thing?” The an-
swer was a resounding no.
Her lab published a landmark paper that
found the incidence of PPA to be at least as high
as PPD. “We weren’t surprised,” she says. “But it
was validating.” Now they’re focused on finding
treatments that don’t involve pharmacological
interventions, because drugs have been shown to
have adverse effects on the developing fetus. “If
there’s any population that deserves nonmedica-
tion-based treatments, it’s new mothers,” she
says. “These women deserve an alternative.”
Unlike postpartum anxiety, postpartum de-
pression has made its way into the common ver-
nacular around early motherhood. In its mildest
form, it’s called the “baby blues” and is experi-
enced by up to 80 percent of new moms, accord-
ing to the National Institute of Mental Health. Al-
though scientists don’t know for certain what
causes it, it’s probably brought on in part by the
sudden hormonal changes experienced after
childbirth. A woman’s brain is bathed in a cocktail
of hormones, including estrogen and progester-
one, throughout her pregnancy, but after she
gives birth the levels plummet almost instantly.
This withdrawal, coupled with the ordeal of
pushing a baby out (or having it cut out of you),
makes new moms very vulnerable to mood swings,
weepiness and irritability. And it’s no longer the
taboo it once was: the discharging nurse at our
hospital told a group of new dads, my husband in-
cluded, that if their partners weren’t having at least
one public breakdown a day, it was only because
they were sobbing alone in the bathroom.
But postpartum depression is not the same as
the baby blues, and what tips some women over
the edge from mild weepiness to major depres-
sive disorder remains, in part, a mystery. Over the
past decade, there has been a steady rise in aca-
demic and clinical research around PPD, but the
same cannot be said for PPA. A search of aca-
demic articles that included the terms perinatal orpostpartum depression yields 6,488 results, with
just 191 for perinatal or postpartum anxiety.
Why the discrepancy? Maybe we just don’t
know how to talk about debilitating anxiety in
motherhood. While the baby blues gave us a com-
mon language for discussing sadness and depres-
sion, anxiety is so often dismissed as normal. New
mothers are expected to feel overwhelmed and
anxious—it’s par for the course.
“There’s a lot of misinformation and miseduca-
tion around what is common and or normal in the
postpartum period,” says Paige Bellenbaum, social
worker and co-founder of the Motherhood Center,
a space in New York City offering a range of treat-
ment options for women suffering from perinatal
mood and anxiety disorders. Women experiencing
anxiety or intrusive thoughts might “think they’re
crazy and they’re not fit to be a mother,” she says.
“It’s probably easier to talk about feeling sad or
weepy than it is to say I feel completely anxious. I
can’t sleep, I can’t eat. I’m hypervigilant. I keep hav-
ing these very intrusive thoughts.”
I eventually found my way to the Motherhood
Center and to Bellenbaum, where a combination
of cognitive-behavioral therapy, dialectical behav-
ioral therapy and psychiatric treatments over the
course of six weeks helped me find a semblance
of normalcy once again. I was admitted into their
day program, a partial hospitalization requiring my
daughter and I to be at the center five hours a
day, five days a week.
Bellenbaum suffered from PPD herself and
co-founded the center when she realized how little
help there was for women out there. “When I finallyOPINION
“There’s a lot of
misinformation and
miseducation around
what is common and or
normal in the
postpartum period.”
—Paige Bellenbaum