Catherine Cho on Postpartum Psychosis
In a story from her book “Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness,” Catherine Cho shares her experience with stress-induced postpartum psychosis.
After her son, Cato, was born, Catherine Cho and her husband, James, left London for a trip to introduce their son to their family who still lived in the US. After traveling for 31 days, Cho began to experience symptoms of postpartum psychosis. She experienced paranoia and felt that she was being watched. She had delusions, including that her baby had devil eyes. She heard voices telling her to kill her baby. She was unable to sleep and felt as though she were in hell.
In this excerpt, she discusses her symptoms, her treatment, and the effect that it had on her relationship with her son. Through her recovery, she had to learn how to love her son again and how to be a mother again. This is because medical practitioners in the US didn’t create the treatment for postpartum psychosis in the US with the best intentions of mothers and their children in mind.
To hear more from Catherine Cho about her experience with postpartum psychosis, listen to her extended interview with Katherine May on the podcast "How We Live Now": https://shows.acast.com/wintering/episodes/60059adb366e922291c73095
I learned that if we’d been in the UK, I would have been admitted to a mother–baby unit, and not as a regular psych patient, as I had been in the US. My psychiatrist told me that the medication I’d been prescribed, haloperidol, was a first-generation drug and not commonly used. Treatment in the UK is focused on keeping mother and baby as close as possible, in order to minimise emotional separation. When I read this, I felt angry. The rules had felt so trivial and arbitrary, and they had had such an impact on our lives. I had come back a stranger, and the distance I felt from Cato wasn’t something I could grieve; it went beyond loss. It was a severance, a removal that was complete.
SOURCE: The Guardian • AUTHOR: Catherine Cho • LAST UPDATED: March 7, 2020
