Our DS1 was a terrible sleeper as a baby. A classic case of feeding hourly during the night, not settling, dreadful at napping. He was hopelessly overtired and as a result he was a pretty miserable all the time and parenting him was hard. For me, motherhood started with a 48 hour induced labour, culminating with a middle-of-the-night emergency CS, so I was already exhausted before I started, and I found breastfeeding excruciatingly painful.
By around 10/12 weeks I was on my knees and clearly struggling to cope. I was worried about bonding with DS and basically hating being a mother. My midwife referred me to my GP, who didn't take long to diagnose PND and Sertraline. Somehow the diagnosis of PND made me feel even worse - yet another thing that hadn't gone according to plan. The Sertraline made me feel horrific initially, and didn't seem to help once things had settled down. As weeks turned into months I still felt awful.
When DS was around 10 months old DH and I couldn't take it any more and sleep trained DS - something we had never, ever thought we would do. It was surprisingly painless and within a few days he went from waking every half hour to sleeping through the night (note - this isn't about the pros and cons of sleep training! - I'm just explaining my experience).
As we slowly began to catch up on sleep, it was like a fog lifting. Everything became easier and more hopeful. DS was more settled, and even when he wasn't, I felt more able to cope. I began to enjoy him, and enjoy being a parent, for the first time. Those dreadful dark days slipped into the past, and we went on to have two more children.
I've been thinking back on my experience, and I do question how new parents, and particularly mothers, are supported with what can be quite horrific lack of sleep. I feel that health professionals are very quick to diagnose PND when in fact it isn't necessarily accurate or helpful. I'm not saying that there is anything that a GP could have done, but simply having someone acknowledge that I was utterly exhausted and that of course it was directly affecting (and possibly entirely responsible for) my mental health would have actually really helped and made me feel that I wasn't going mad.
Clearly I am not for a minute saying that PND isn't very, very real for many mothers, and that correctly diagnosing and treating it is incredibly important. But it just seems to have become so easy to 'blame' PND for anything and expect anti depressants to compensate for getting two hours of broken sleep for months on end, and that a mis-diagnosis of PND is actually quite harmful.