Postpartum depression isn't just the blahs you feel in the aftermath of a big life change. It's not just anxiety about this new person or exhaustion after too many sleepless nights, that endless series of timeless darkness and bleary days that no one quite explains to you before you have an infant. It goes far, far deeper than that. I know because I've had three children. With the first two, sure, there were those nights when my husband had to take over to keep me from fleeing to Mexico, never to be seen again. But with our third, it was different.
We had struggles--he couldn't breastfeed and I pumped every two hours, around the clock, to make sure he got breastmilk. We stayed up all night together for days--weeks--on end. I was obsessed with SIDS, convinced that every time I awoke, I would find him dead in his crib. I thought he was going to die, that he wouldn't live past the age of six months. I would look into his eyes in the darkness, only a nightlight illuminating what was near-madness for me, and we'd stare at each other. I don't know what he was thinking, but at the time, I thought he was telling me that yes, he was going to die, and soon.
He is now five years old. I'm no longer in the midst of that near psychosis. We both got through it, but not with the help of any modern interventions. I asked my OB about it, very concerned about my state, but she didn't seem to take it seriously. I'm still not sure why--my calm presentation of it? My education level? At any rate, I took matters into my own hands and forced myself to do things that would stabilize my mental health, things I do to this day: walking outside with Dickensian intensity. Eating food so spicy it makes me cry--and pop off a huge bolus of endorphins. Eating chocolate. Writing, my main form of catharsis. Thank the deities that it worked. Thank the deities that the darkness that hung over those nightlight-dim nights did not become deeper or lead me into true psychosis, one that might have led me to take away a son, a brother, a life.
At the time I was experiencing this bottomless trough, we already had known for two years that our oldest son had autism. From the time our third son was born, I worried about autism. I did. I watched him even after I recovered from postpartum depression, monitoring him for signs of delay of any kind, ready to step in with some early intervention. He had many. But we'd had five years of living with our autistic son, one of our greatest joys, and I didn't have a fear of autism. I had a fear of SIDS. And because SIDS is deadly, because I'd written quite a few things about SIDS, because I'd purposely sought out information about preventing SIDS in the infancies of each of our sons, my obsession during my postpartum depression was...SIDS. Not autism.
The morbid obsessions that strike during a deep mood trough can be unpredictable, but when you look at them in context, they can make a whole lot of sense from the perspective of mental illness. We fixate on what is before us, on what we know, on what we've inculcated as our deepest fears, our greatest anxieties. To this day, I know that I'm experiencing anxiety of some kind not because I feel it consciously but because when I'm anxious, I dream about my greatest personal fear: roaches. It's strange, I know, but the brain is an enigma that sometimes serves itself up only in metaphorical bits. It's up to us to apply whatever insight we have to put it all together.
Lacking that insight can be fatal. Last year, a woman killed her 6-month-old son by smothering him. She did so, she said, because she was afraid that he was showing signs of autism. According to medical professionals with personal experience with the boy, Rylan, he seemed to have been developing typically. The mother, the boy's father reported, had been depressed and was taking Zoloft. The day before she killed her son--after a series of failed attempts--she had said to her husband that he'd be better off without her and their son.
The mother, reports say, thought she had postpartum depression and commented to friends about it before she killed her infant. It was severe enough to metastasize into a psychosis that led her to kill her child out of, according to her, a fear that he was autistic. The DA involved in the case recently elected not to try her because of her ongoing mental state. According to reports, she was obsessed with the notion that her son was autistic and that his autism would destroy her life, her marriage, her finances, and her fun. Her husband filed for divorced within days of their son's murder, and he has also filed a wrongful death suit. She was aware enough of her actions to have, according to reports, hidden the blankets she ultimately used to suffocate the child on her final attempt. The story is horrific.
The mother's work experience prior to having the baby included two years working as a counselor at a children's hospital, where she had encountered children with autism. I do not know what the attitude of the professionals or parents at the hospital were about autism. What I do know is that if she had paid attention to any one of the thousands of fear-mongering news media reports about autism, she'd've been terrified if, in her mind, her son were showing signs of it. I know that if she'd paid any attention at all to what some organizations that purport to help autistic people say about it, she'd've been terrified at the prospect. I also know that if she'd read any of the verbiage on the Internet about "toxic" children, "monsters" whose "real selves" were "stolen" from their parents, she'd be terrified. Stories purporting to describe the horrific financial burdens of autism. Stories focusing on the horrific toll autism reportedly takes on marriages and families. Stories with the angle that autism destroys lives.
In the aggregate, experiencing wave after wave of information about the alleged horrors of autism--and working in a place where she'd likely seen the most severely affected autistic people--did this mother see autism as the bogeyman of the darkest hours of the night, the thing that would take her child away and replace him with a monster? Would the autism monster steal her marriage, her finances, her fun? She was insane, it seems certain, and still is. But the focus of her insanity was personal. Was autism for her what SIDS was for me, a thief in the night, the obsessions that haunted me in my mental abyss? The ones that made me sure that my son wouldn't survive infancy?
This woman killed her son with her own hands. She murdered him, and clearly, her mental state was in utter imbalance. She was in a place that people probably will never understand unless they've been there themselves. When you're in that place, the specters are many. It's a shadowy forest with little light, one where intangible demons take psychotic shape, one where the future looks like nothing. There is no logic in this place, and things that usually have little import become heavy with threat.
When you're depressed, you fight your own demons. Yes, that's true. But you're not the only person responsible for their existence...or their treatment. Rylan's mother had complained that she thought she had postpartum depression. She brought up killing herself and her son before she did so. These are all huge red flags that warrant immediate action.
Among those shadows of darkness, one will loom largest. It will become the greatest fear, the one that drives your mind into even deeper, more impenetrable shadow. But what that greatest fear will become isn't a simple matter of the choices of your own disabled, lightless mind. There's a world out there that reinforces fear, hammers anxiety into you, one sharp, pointed sensationalized detail at a time. In the world of Rylan's mother, that fear took the shape of autism, and she didn't build that monster by herself.
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Today, we are working to let people know that autism isn't a deadly specter. Please take a moment to read through some of the tweets.
