I agree. Just been discharged from the Mother and Baby Unit but I am sceptical I was ever "ill" in the sense they would see it as.
I grew up with chronic alcoholism and my mother couldn't cope so was very frequently absent either physically or emotionally e.g. she did some really weird shit like taking a girl in the year above me at school on holiday because she had such a "difficult family life" and taking her for walks/meals out and ignoring my suffering entirely, when we used to fight when I was a teenager she would drive off in the car with me begging and screaming for her to come back, blah blah Angela's ashes etc.
There are generations of poor parenting in my family, violence and abuse and all sorts of weirdness and when I had my children I was VERY anxious about realising that I had no "template of normality" and this was heightened by the constant stream of professionals coming into my home to tell me I wasn't getting it right (ds1 and 2 both had serious issues with breastfeeding which we later realised was tongue tie related.., as all my family had breastfed but were otherwise shit I made the leap that I had already failed my children and became depressed).
But let's look at this differently:
I was living with my husband in a different country with no family
My best friend effectively dumped me as soon as I got pregnant as she found it so hard as she was having serious fertility issues
I was told I was going to lose my job
We were having financial difficulties
My father went into a coma and I hadn't been speaking to him
My grandmother who raised me was critically ill
I threatened miscarriage all through the first and second trimesters - literally experiencing labour like pain every few weeks with no cause found
I had morning sickness until 29 weeks
I had been raped as a young woman and found my initial forceps birth had triggered a lot of strong feelings around this that made me super-anxious about birth.
Things that have been said to me by "professionals":
Well all women worry about their babies but yours is definitely at the disordered end of the spectrum.
I spoke to your GP and he was really surprised you had OCD as he thought you seemed quite competent!
No one thinks there is anything wrong with his tongue but you - you have to consider what this means (no one had looked inside his mouth and I am a speech therapist with training in the anatomy of the mouth!)
Worriers like you always find the aspects of childcare other women find easy difficult but that's just your nature
Your problem is that you overestimate the importance of your own thoughts
There is nothing to worry about but you are interpreting your experience as though there is something to worry about which is what is making you ill
It must be very hard for your husband to live with your anxiety
Your husband sounds as anxious as you, you might want to consider what this means for the future if you get help and he doesn't.
Even better, the experience of being in appointments where people spoke about the most shaming and private experiences such as my father defecating in my room and forcing me to sit in a chair while he shouted at me until I "admitted" I had done it, my father screaming at me for three hours in a crowded dining carriage that I was a useless narcissistic bitch etc as though I wasn't there... and when I said these things, there were sage nodding professionals humming and hawing over how I fit to the literature.
Feeling crap about having been abused = "ruminating about the past". Worrying that your child might be at risk as you appear to be having labour like pains and had a shit first birth = "catastrophising".
Saying hey, I feel really well today = "minimising the severity of your illness".
As if that weren't enough, I missed ONE appointment when my son was 6 weeks old and had to endure endless discussion about whether this represented disengagement WHEN I was attending weekly therapy from the time he was 10 days old which involved me having to get to the session on public transport when I was terrified that he would get germs from being on the bus. Apparently I "didn't really want help" and I had to realise that my condition would become chronic if I didn't do what was suggested.
When I eventually complained IN WRITING, I had a response saying that they wished to meet me - the entire care team and me, no advocate so four of them, one of me - to discuss "the challenges faced by everybody in your episode of care". When I said I didn't care about the "challenges" they faced by me missing ONE appointment when I was ill with a SIX WEEK OLD, they said I was trying to "control" and "manipulate" the situation and that I needed to realise their "experiences were as valid as mine" and "there were rights and wrongs on all sides".
What? To miss ONE APPOINTMENT out of, perhaps, 30? Thankfully I had a CBT therapist I was seeing weekly who helped me realise and not take on responsibility for this but in the review meeting, everything I said as challenged and dismissed until my therapist could "vouch" for the fact that actually, you know, I was working pretty hard at pretty much everything.
My experience has been a disgrace. Thankfully I am nearly at the end of my complaint about it now but it was VERY sobering and eye opening about how women's distress is pathologised and made intrinsic to them rather than a product of life experiences etc.