"Feeling low and feeling really bad about feeling low": Women's experiences of motherhood and postpartum depression.

Abstract

AbstractTwo bodies of work on postpartum depression are reviewed. Quantitative, positivist studies examine the epidemiology and aetiology of postpartum depression, adopt a medical model of explanation and conceptualize postpartum depression as a pathological response to motherhood. Social scientific studies, some from a feminist perspective, explore women's experiences of postpartum depression predominantly, but not exclusively, within a qualitative tradition. Postpartum depression is theorized as a normal response to motherhood and is linked to public-world losses of identity, autonomy, independence, power, and paid employment. Drawing on a qualitative study of 40 women's experiences of motherhood, this article argues that not all women become depressed following childbirth and women's varying responses to motherhood need to be recognized. A relational re-framing of postpartum depression is put forward. From this perspective, postpartum depression occurs when women are unable to experience, express and validate their feelings and needs within supportive, accepting and non-judgmental interpersonal relationships and cultural contexts.When you're depressed ... you think you're just in this little and you can't find your way out. It is absolutely horrible, it really is ... wanted my friends round me, but when they were around me, didn't want them around ... You feel so alone, but then again was making myself alone, if you know what mean? didn't want to mix with people and yet, at the same time, because didn't want to mix with them, so they sort of kept away from me ... They weren't or anything, but they sort of thought 'Oh well, leave her alone for a minute, she'll be all right.' thought, 'Oh they're rejecting me,' so they did wasn't right in my eyes, and I'm not normally like that.Sophie(f.1) lives in a council house with her three children aged 12, 6 and 2 years, and with the father of her third child. Six years ago she experienced a relatively shortlived (eight weeks) but highly distressing episode of depression which set in five months after the birth of her second child. She was 25 at the time, and a full-time mother of a six-year-old and her new baby. She was also a single mother having left the father of her second child shortly after she became pregnant. But she lived in a close-knit community, a few streets away from her parents, and surrounded by her friends. Sophie characterized her depression as feeling stuck in a dark space, a tunnel which she could not get out of. She went on to articulate the complex nature of this sense of isolation. She describes how alone she felt, but also points out that, as she says, I was making myself alone. Although she was surrounded by friends who were willing to help and support her, she withdrew from them, which in turn led them to distance themselves from her. Sophie explains how her depression, and the complex dynamics of her relationships, were not simply the result of her friends being nasty or anything. She was viewing the world from a particular perspective, and perceiving her friends in such a way that whatever they did wasn't right in my eyes. Sophie describes her depression as, in part, a self-imposed isolation, an active withdrawal from other people that was to some extent independent of the behaviour of others, but was related to the way in which she perceived those around her.Sophie was one of 40 women interviewed in a qualitative study of motherhood and postpartum depression. This excerpt from Sophie's interview reveals the lucid and articulate quality of mothers' accounts, and how much we can learn about their psychological and social worlds by eliciting and attending closely to their words. Yet, the majority of research in the area of postpartum depression has disregarded mothers as a source of knowledge or understanding about their experiences. Mothers' perceptions, subjectivities and accounts have been accorded little value in a field of inquiry which has been dominated by quantitative research within a positivist tradition. …