I’m not going to read the thread, because I like my blood pressure the level it is, but I feel compelled to share my story here.
I have two daughters. I also have ADHD, have had clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder since childhood, and had postpartum depression with both babies. I breastfed my first daughter for fifteen months, which contributed to my postpartum depression because for the first many months of her life, I could never spend more than two hours away from her. (Okay, we chanced it once and went to dinner and a movie after she was hopefully asleep for the next few hours, but I was feeding her again two hours after we got home.) This kid never, ever would drink more than a couple swallows from a bottle. I couldn’t be on my regular medications until she was weaned, and once she was, I felt so much better.
My postpartum depression was worse with my second baby, because I felt like I didn’t have the time, energy or patience to be a good mother to two kids. I felt like my relationship with my older daughter had evaporated because I was always breastfeeding my younger daughter, and sitting in the baby’s room with her started making me feel claustrophobic. It felt like I was rooted in one place and couldn’t escape. With both kids, I hated breastfeeding in public. I didn’t want to stick a red-faced baby under a blanket in 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and I didn’t want to sit in public with part of my breast exposed. One time in the library, this little boy just sat and stared at me for about ten minutes while I was breastfeeding.
I didn’t like any part of my life anymore, and I felt like I was irreparably damaging both of my kids. I started fixating on the idea that if I killed myself soon, they’d forget me, and my husband could have the chance to find them some shiny new mother who would be a better one than I was. He’s a good-looking guy who makes good money, and I could see a lot of women wanting to date this attractive widower with two precious, motherless little girls. It crossed my mind that maybe I could quit breastfeeding and go back on my regular meds, but “breast was best,” and the baby refused to drink from a bottle anyway. And it would be so unfair to quit breastfeeding her when I breastfed her sister for fifteen months.
I ended up holding a knife to my wrist and going to the psych ward - and I still wouldn’t quit breastfeeding. This was going to be my “supermother” story - not even a psychiatric hospitalization could stop me from doing the best thing for my baby! Only nothing had changed at all. I still felt like I was ruining my kids, I still felt intermittently suicidal, and I still felt like there was nothing about my life I liked anymore. I tried switching to combination feeding, but my daughter would launch Gandhi-esque hunger strikes until she was breastfed.
Finally, I just was not physically able to breastfeed this child anymore. My milk supply was fine, but I could not bring myself to unsnap the nursing bra and all the rest of it. I had to cold-turkey wean her. Then I got back on my regular medications, and it was like the part in The Wizard of Oz where the movie changes from sepia to full color.
My daughter only took about ten minutes to eat, not forty. Other people could feed her. I took my older daughter to the zoo, which was the first time she’d done anything with “just Mama” for seven months. I suddenly wanted to take both kids out in public, and I was excited for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I bought a plaster bust at a thrift store (charity shop), covered the whole thing in magazine paper, did the same thing to a battered toy horse, and won a blue ribbon for the horse at the state fair. (My younger daughter still refers to that horse as “Neigh-Neigh.”) I felt like a person again, not a depressed warm milk machine.
I wish I’d formula-fed both kids from day one, and actually enjoyed their early months. TL;DR: breast is not best if the baby’s depressed mother needs to get back on her regular psych meds so she quits feeling numb towards her children, and quits wanting to die.