I don’t think anything could have been done. I mean, I think this is one of the problems I think with postnatal depression, especially in women that have been successful. I don’t mean successful as in other people think you’re successful. You’ve been successful because you think you’re successful. So in highly competent strong women who’ve always done what they wanted to do, no matter what that is, and I wouldn’t think it would make any difference what walk of life you came from, to me this feels and sounds like an attitudinal thing. If that competence and control is being undermined I don’t know how you get them – I don’t, I don’t know that anyone could have got me to admit except after a very long period of really trying hard.

Because I then tried with – well, I mean, I have tried with people that I could see my – similarities with my experience, and they wouldn’t admit it, and they wouldn’t admit it til a very long time afterwards that there was even a problem. And yeah, so I mean, I think that’s an issue. And maybe the only thing that can be done is to normalise is, which is what’s happening is, for a lot of women. A normal part of being a mother is that you have some kind of postnatal experience and the more people talk about it the more normal it is.

Now it mightn’t – it’s not for everybody but if it’s just a normal part of, you know, this could happen to you the same way as you could get stretch marks or you could get tearing, or you – then it’s not such a big deal. So. But I think women won’t call it postnatal depression either, they’ll just call it something else. You know, it’ll be a normal part, a bit down and a bit whatever.

Just progressively feeling more and more like myself really.

And, you know, I’ve changed careers, I now run my own business. I’ve done things I, you know, done things I never thought I’d do, travelled, so since the kids have been born I’ve been going overseas by myself regularly.

So I’ve seen a lot of the world that I hadn’t seen previously. So life is very, very different to what it would have been even if I’d just – if I’d never had the depression life would be very different. And so the depr – the PND really helped me be very clear about who I am and what I want to do I guess. So in that way it was good.

I’m much clearer on who I am and who I’m not. I’m – I mean, it’s hard, because I haven’t got access to the person I would have been if I’d continued on that trajectory, it’s hard to know how I would have turned out but I’m much more adult. I take responsibility for myself and my actions, I talk in I’ language about, I feel, I want, I think.

I didn’t want to have a conversation about how wonderful it was to be a mother. So my mother’s group was actually full of women who really didn’t want to be mothers which is quite ironic really. And so we would bond over red wine and moaning over our children not sleeping. So that was quite fun, you know, I quite enjoyed their – but there’s only so much of that you can do without sending yourselves mad. So we’d probably only meet once a month, I guess, but I mean that was great, they were very, very honest about what they were going through. While my, the work colleague I’d mentioned before, he mother’s group weren’t like that, so she – her experience was quite – so it was interesting comparing the two.

In some ways mine helped in the sense that I could still be – I could at least be honest with somebody, but I didn’t want to join – I mean, I had met other women with babies and they were saying come to play group and I just – if they were in la la land, as I called it, about, you know, how wonderful it was to be a mother of a small baby then I didn’t want to know about it.

When I came out [place name] Council was running a pilot program of postnatal depression support group run with [NGO name] and a qualified psychologist. So there were 10 of us, I think, and we met on a weekly basis for an hour and a half to talk about, you know, what was happening for us and how we were coping.

They taught us some cognitive behaviour therapies. And we kept – I think that was a 12 week program, or 14 week program, and we kept it going. We employed the psychologist that had been part of the pilot, we kept her going for another 12 weeks I think after that and, just – that got most of us over the hump.

And a lot of that came along with – well, it really started – I mean, I got back to work and I’d been promoted. I mean, the company had done a very, very good job really and saw me as quite ungrateful, and I probably was, because they’d bent over backwards really to do everything they thought they should do to show me how much they supported me and how much they wanted me back. And I basically think I was back for, I don’t know, six month and said, right, I’m off to [country name], see you later.

But it became perfectly clear to me, I was, I can’t remember what I was – I was sitting at my desk for whatever reason and my manager had said to me, we need to do X, Y and Z. I had – I was project managing, was my part-time job. Part-time. Yeah anyway. So that was what I was doing and he said something or other. I can remember thinking, it’s the job or my child. Now that wasn’t – he hadn’t – I mean, that wasn’t what he was asking me to do but that’s what it felt like.

I could either focus on her or I could focus on my job but I couldn’t do both. Now that could be – I mean, a lot of that’s me, that’s, I get very intense about particular things that I’m doing. But it felt like I couldn’t do both. I couldn’t give them what they needed in terms of my buy in and energy and give my child what she needed. And at that point I decided that she was more important and then really started in on [husband] about we need to go overseas, you know, there’s this opportunity, you know, blah, blah, blah. So yes, solved it by running away which, you know, that’s a strategy, works in the short term [laughs].

I didn’t go around telling – well, I mean, now, there most people don’t know that I’ve had postnatal depression, so I wasn’t going around shouting from the roof tops, yee hee, look, I’ve got Zoloft (sertraline), wee hee!

I wasn’t. But at the same time, if anyone had asked me directly I wasn’t uncomfortable with saying I was on it. It did get in the way, I didn’t feel like me, I felt like I lost a lot of my higher cognitive functions. I found thinking abstractly or highly abstractly very difficult. So if it was a concrete train of thought or if it was about sort of general sort of political issues or whatever, I could deal with it. If it was thinking about, you know, philosophy of anything, I couldn’t. So it was that next level of I just couldn’t go there, my brain wouldn’t do it, and I didn’t like that.

So, yeah, and as I said before, I lived a long, lived a lot in my head and so it felt, it felt like part of my – I didn’t have access to everything really. But it also, I mean, it did help. That’s the other thing, it really, once I stabilised the dosage it got rid of most of the symptoms, if not all of them. Every so often I’d still get a bit of anxiety but I could manage that with breathing and visualisation. And also, my stomach’s really rumbling here, this is going to be a very interesting soundtrack. It’s yeah it, yeah so got rid of most of it, you – the anxiety was manageable, and there wasn’t really, I didn’t get any physical side effects of it. Every so often I’d get a headache, that’d be about the most. Yeah. But it had to be done.

And we told her what had happened and because I’d had antenatal depression obviously they were keeping a much closer eye on me. And [son] had silent reflux, again wasn’t sleeping, and as he continued to not – he fed really well though, but as he continued to not sleep I could feel myself sliding in and I couldn’t stop it. And at that point we threw up red flags and said we need help. Our maternal child health nurse – because we didn’t have – I’d have private health insurance but I hadn’t had it for long enough to get health care, or mental health care, under that system.

So we actually went to [hospital name], and they did a – pulled a swiftie and got me in on [son] having silent reflux. So we were in the mother/baby unit there for two weeks with his silent reflux. Which he did have but they kept me there for an extra week for me so he could be treated. And they were fabulous. They were just excellent.

Okay. So I’ve had two rounds of depression. One wasn’t diagnosed but looking back it was depression, and the second one was diagnosed. Both of them were to do with small children and giving birth. So both – the second one was diagnosed as antenatal depression, I was diagnosed at five months with my second child, five months pregnant.

I was diagnosed with antenatal depression and that diagnosis then seemed to just carry over. So because I’d been diagnosed with depression during pregnancy and the symptoms hadn’t alleviated then I got rolled in. So it wasn’t – the diagnosis of antenatal depression, my stomach fell and I thought, oh great, because I’d been there. And so, yeah, I wasn’t very happy. In fact, I got quite cross at the doctor at the time. And it took me a few days to get my head around it, that, you know, things were going to have to change and I was going to have to become active and actually do something about managing myself. And I wasn’t very happy about, you know, it wasn’t fair.

It really didn’t feel fair about why, I’ve already been through this once and managed to get through it, why does this have to happen again? And then the guilt started. Well, if I’d, you know, tried to get help the first time would I be going through it the second time and blah, blah, blah. And I really wasn’t going to go through another year of what I’d been through with [daughter].

It was basically, basically talking therapy. So a lot of it was to do with my parents’ divorce when I was quite young and it seemed to stem from the relationship, or lack thereof, I had with my father. So when I went and found a, a counsellor, and she wasn’t a psychologist she was a counsellor but she came very highly recommended, she had me talking about how I felt and journaling and doing the – you know, talking to the chair and writing letters and doing all those sorts of sort of therapeutic I guess practices.

And I saw her for about three months, about 12 sessions, and that seemed to help me get it under control. So she also worked with me on my breathing. So we didn’t do any cognitive behaviour therapy, which I’d done like, I did that later on, so I didn’t do, it wasn’t that. It was more getting out what appeared to be the issue and it really helped.