Battling Depression

By M Walker

I think for most of my post-natal depression I felt as if I was permanently constrained by chains and that someone else had control of my life. It was as if even though I desperately wanted to break free, I just didn’t know how to.

The funny thing is too, I love writing and I love to keep a diary on my children when I remember, but in the throws of my depression I just didn’t know how to even pick up a pen, let alone describe what I was going through. How could I tell others what I was experiencing when I didn’t even know myself? How could I tell people that I wasn’t enjoying motherhood? Needless to say my diary during my thickest bout of depression was quite slim and in fact only 2 lines were taken up to discuss months of torment and anguish and the confusion that I felt at that time in my life.

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Anywhere from 5-25% of women who give birth get some form of post-natal depression. One reason for the wide range in the numbers is the difficulty of pinning down exactly what it is. But women who have had it know too well what it feels like.

Anywhere from a few days to a few weeks after giving birth, some women will feel ‘the blues’, a moodiness that seems unrelated to external events. It may last only a few days, or as long as a couple of weeks. Longer depressions may be a sign of something more fundamental. Here again, one difficulty in discussing the condition is the widely varying time period that women experience.

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By Courtenay Cameron

What is depression?

Many of us say “I’m feeling depressed” when we feel sad or miserable. But usually, these feelings pass after a while. But clinical depression is when these feelings are disabling and interfer with your life. Clinical depression can stop people from leading a normal life, it makes everything harder to do and everything may seem less worthwhile. At its most severe depression can be life-threatening, because it can make people suicidal or simply give up the will to live.

How do I know if I am depressed?

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Article Date: 22 Mar 2006 - 15:00pm (UK)

According to a US study, mothers can pass depression on to their children. On the other hand, if the mother is successfully treated for depression, the chances of her children developing psychiatric disorders goes down significantly.

This is the first study to look at a link between a child’s mental health and his/her mother’s (successful or not) treatment for depression.

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