How much PND do you think is a rational reaction to awful circumstances?

namechangeguy wrote - "There also seems to be a very high rate of male suicide - one report states that in 2011, of just over 6,000 suicides in the UK, 75 per cent were male; news.sky.com/story/1068998/huge-problem-of-male-suicide-rate-in-uk And no, this isn't whataboutthemenz. I am asking those in the know whether the OP is part of a wider mental healthcare problem/attitude in the UK."

Every person who has mental health problems should receive much better support and care.

I think a more accurate indicator of mental illness is attempted suicide, not "successful" suicide. Achieving death in a suicide attempt is often a function of which method was used, and typically men use more effective methods. I think the statistics show that males and females attempt suicide in roughly equal numbers, but I do realise that it's much more difficult to collect and analyse statistics of attempted suicide, e.g. because of issues surrounding the question of "when does self-harm become attempted suicide?". (Statistics show females self-harm more than males).

A person who ends up dead did not necessarily have more severe mental illness than a person who does not die. For example, depression in some people is so severe that it removes their ability to attempt suicide.

I don't wish to undermine the OP's misogyny angle - it's her thread, she can say what she wants. But I have some questions for any health professionals in here. Is the UK particularly bad at dealing with mental health issues, compared to other Western nations? I have heard anecdotal accounts of soldiers with PTSD being left to their own devices countless times. There also seems to be a very high rate of male suicide - one report states that in 2011, of just over 6,000 suicides in the UK, 75 per cent were male;

news.sky.com/story/1068998/huge-problem-of-male-suicide-rate-in-uk

And no, this isn't whataboutthemenz. I am asking those in the know whether the OP is part of a wider mental healthcare problem/attitude in the UK.

Also, one thing I have learned from this site is that a woman's right to choose pregnancy and partner (or lack of) is sacrosanct. How many women who have no supportive partner/father for the children have actually chosen this path?

reading this thread with interest. Especially as the 2 HVs I had after the birth of ds were amazing and instrumental in me getting the support I needed to recover from ptsd.

both of them booked me extra appointments to check I was ok and kept seeing me until 14 months after ds was born. I cannot rate them high enough. I am tearful with thanks just writing this. A terrible first year that I only survived intact because if the help and support I got. I feel it very likely I could have descended into pnd had I not been so fortunate.

Don't, however, get me started on post natal care in hospitals. That's what caused the fucking ptsd in the first place

Yes yes yes Beer I would definitely say my problems were PTSD - although I was never diagnosed with PND, I did have a lot of bonding issues etc but I had a horrendous birth.

This is a very interesting thread. I do think generally/traditionally women's health problems have either been ignored or medicated (which, when you think about it is just the same as being ignored really). However, important to acknowledge too that many women who do have supportive partners, good births etc still go on to get PND.

I think johnny's post up-thread makes a lot of sense.

Forgive me for posting in ignorance and with something some may find trite. I just thought it was a good way to look at it.

I've seen someone compare getting PND when your situation is unsupportive and misogynistic to getting a septic wound. If you got a septic wound, no-one would say the cause wasn't real or physical, because it is. But if you live in a culture where people don't know you shouldn't expose wounds to dirt, you're more likely to get one.

The implication was to say that women are constantly being put in contact with misogynistic ideas about how they should heal after a birth.

If this is trite or unhelpful, do ignore, I only mention it because I know some people would worry that if we say PND is a response to circumstances, it's like saying it's not a 'real' illness. I don't agree with that, but I think this provides a way of looking at it that shows something can be both real, and dependent on the attitudes of society.

We talked about exactly this in a lecture last week and it really made me think about PND in a new light. My lecturer's view was the same, that we overpathologise a lot of new mothers and "diagnose" them, when what they are feeling is just the normal reaction to one of the biggest life changes you can go through. You're exhausted, out of touch with your normal social circle and daily routine, mourning your single life, and you've got a wailing baby who is solely reliant on you. Who wouldn't be on an emotional roller coaster? The key is making sure all women get support, while picking up on those cases that are more serious and do require medical treatment.

This is a really good thread DogsAreEasierThanChildren thank you for starting it. It is one thread I have been wanting to start for ages but never found the right wording/time!

I haven't got time at the moment to add some thoughts (other than I agree with your OP) so just marking my place for later when hopefully I can join in more!

I would include support from the health services as well, I think.

I've just seen in the last year my two SILs having babies here in France. Their births were straightforward, no real issues. After birth, they were given private rooms, where they stayed for 5 days until breastfeeding was established, and mum and baby fully recovered. Nurses took care of the babies at night so the mums could catch some sleep (they would bring them in for feeding). They had physiologists and gynecologists come see them to make sure physically things were looking good, and to give them postnatal exercises. They had breastfeeding support workers.

Every French woman who has heard my labour story has been shocked, I mean jaw-droppingly shocked. The idea that a woman with an emergency section after 2 days of labour would A) be forced to take care of her baby all on her own, on a noisy ward, and then B) sent home 36 hours after surgery, was simply insane to them.

I arrived home with DS having not slept a wink in 4 days, totally shattered from labour and surgery -- and then expected to hit the ground running, as it were. I feel like I never got a chance to recover at all from birth, and that massively affected my ability to cope with newborn life.

I feel like it's a feminist issue because I strongly believe men would not be forced to cope with such physical demands with so little support. And I wonder how many cases of PND might be prevented if women had access to more care in the aftermath of birth.

I looked into PND and found the biggest correlate is poor support. So, whether that be crap husbands or lack of family, this is a BIG predisposing factor (as well as having previous form for mental health issues).

I'm not so sure the brain responds as rationally as you are making out. At the same time, I don't know if PND is overdiagnosed (I can believe it is - we live in a pill-popping culture after all). I DO know that where women genuinely suffer from PND, it is devastating - my mother had two bouts of PND the worst which lasted 18mo and finished when they did electroshock treatment.

I see it as an enormous adjustment for women. You're sleep deprived, pretty much on your own throughout, getting over the trauma of the birth, and sometimes surrounded by arseholes, and in my experience you also lose your aggressive instinct for some reason - and I could have done with a bit of that to help me through.

I agree OP

I got a bit of this when I was on ML. 'Oh, is it PND?' No, it's just that I haven't slept more than 3 hours at a time in six months!

Then DH and I switched, I worked and he did the FT parenting. And amazingly, once I learned how to sleep again, everything was pretty great.

I think there is a history though of women's life struggles being pathologized, instead of alleviated through societal and political changes.

Certainly when terrible things happen, there is a natural depression which is a normal reaction to stressful, bad situations... you feel bad, because life IS bad for you at that time.

Then there is the hormonal PND which is depression when "life is good".

I guess some of the question is, do the AD help both scenarios, as a crutch whilst addressing the crap life issues and/or the hormonal imbalance?

Um, I don't know that she wasn't, actually.

I took ds2 to be weighed at the clinic and happened to for him to be weighed by the head of the service, who was lovely.

She was so nice, in fact, that I broke down, and asked her why my Hv kept turning up without an appointment, why she kept insisting on ds2 being stripped so she could check him for bruising, and that if there were child protection concerns, could someone please tell me because I would actually rather deal with a social worker.

She was rather shocked, especially when I said that I drafted a friend in to be with me when the Hv visited, and tht not only did the Hv start talking about my mental health problems, she was wrong about them and had asked me 'if the voices have got any worse'. (Honestly. This is absolutely true and exactly what she said and did. It sounds like a joke, or an exaggeration, but it's not). Anyway, head of hvs was all cats bum mouth, made me a horrid but well meaning cup of horribly sweet tea, and I never saw a Hv at my house again.

My kids weren't on any sort of protection list btw.

I actually had 3 nice HVs too! One in particular was fab and helped DD through her enuresis.

Perhaps it's like the whole customer service thing - we remember the bad and forget the good? All I can say is that your HV was lucky she wasn't subject to disciplinary proceedings with that behaviour.

Well, I don't know. My experience was only that. But if you were to post a thread asking who thought their health visitor was helpful, and another one asking who thought their health visitor was a hindrance, it should give you a vague idea of how hvs in this country are performing

A lot - how many? Many of my colleagues are HV, and a lot of them are not shit. What she suggested to you was way out of range of what they would ever, ever have said - I think it's a shame that a (very) small minority tar the rest with the same brush

badguider I agree - I was told I had PND and offered anti-ds more than once after we lost two of our triplets. The HV and GP were not particularly interested in offering any other support. I did not, do not and (as yet...) never have had PND, and I consider myself very lucky as I've witnessed a good friend go through a severe form of both PND and post-natal psychosis and wouldn't wish them on anyone.

No.... Not all of them. A lot of them though. A lot of them are shit.

But to be fair, given a supportive partner who pulled his weigh, I may not have gone from the occasional bad day to full blown sobbing on a grubby unchanged bed for hours, day after day. The Hv didn't give me depression, but she did adequately demonstrate the attitude to families that aren't coping, which is to turn to the mother and say "Well? This is all your problem, you fix it!"

That HV is shit - not all of them are that crap, to be fair.

I agree with you, but to change that would mean changing the entire culture of parenting in this country... When my health visitor was bitching at me for having a very messy house with a five week old and an autistic three year old, I pointed out that I was not the adult in the house. "Yes" she replied. "And it's your job to make him help"

And I thought - fucking awesome. Another job to add to the long list of jobs I haven't done, or that I'm shit at.