Tag Archives: Postnatal Depression

Sep 30 2014

GIVEAWAY: Win 1 of 5 copies of Guilt-Free Bottle Feeding by Madeleine Morris & Dr Sasha Howard (CD: 31/10/2014)

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I’ve written dozens of posts now about breastfeeding. Although I’d urge mum (that can!) to try and breastfeed, I know better than most that it isn’t easy. I lasted 6 weeks with both of my babies and I’m incredibly proud of myself for lasting that long.

With both children I was hit by crippling depression and anxiety. Although I believe every mother has the capacity to breastfeed, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best thing for her or her baby. My mental health really suffered as a result of breastfeeding and yet I put myself under incredible pressure to continue. Panic attacks ensued and I wound up being hospitalised several times. As a result I wasn’t the best mother I could be, and I didn’t enjoy those first precious weeks with Dexter or Heidi.

But Breast is Best… right?

Maybe not. Madeleine Morris and Dr Sasha Howard have now launched a myth-busting book that shows women they are not bad mothers if they can’t or don’t want to breastfeed; Guilt-Free Bottle Feeding - why your formula-fed baby can be happy, healthy and smart.

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This isn’t an anti-breastfeeding book, it’s an anti-guilt book

Unfortunately, in the quest to promote breastfeeding, formula and mothers who formula-feed or mix-feed have become demonised… We have all come to believe that ‘good mothers breastfeed, bad mothers bottle feed’. This is not only simply wrong, this ill-founded belief is damaging mothers, and their relationships with their babies, in what should be one of the happiest times of their lives. Madeleine Morris

9781908281777
Half of all British babies will have a bottle of formula before they are a week old and their mothers feel guilty. They feel guilty because every single book, poster and midwife tells them that breastfeeding is the single most important thing they can do for their babies.
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But for some families, breast isn’t best. Some mums don’t produce enough milk, some have post-natal depression, others are juggling two kids already, or need to go back to work, and some mums simply don’t like breastfeeding. Are they bad mothers? No! But they believe themselves to be.
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Guilt-Free Bottle Feeding, written by award winning former BBC presenter Madeleine Morris and paediatrician Dr Sasha Howard resets the conversation around infant feeding, revealing how the benefits of breastfeeding have been oversold to British parents, and showing guilt-wracked new mothers they have not failed their babies by giving them formula.
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With a thorough, yet easy-to-understand analysis of science, parenting sociology and the modern media, Guilt-Free Bottle Feeding provides a balanced, much- needed and long-overdue alternative view to the simplistic message that ‘breast is best’. This practical book proves that despite the huge pressure women feel to breastfeed, it possible to raise perfectly happy, healthy and smart bottle-fed and mixed-fed children.

Breast milk is wonderful stuff… but sometimes breastfeeding doesn’t work out, for a huge number of complex physical and social reasons. We need to show mums they are not failures for giving their babies a bottle. Dr Sasha Howard

Guilt-Free Bottle Feeding:
  • Examines over a hundred original medical journal articles to show the benefits of breastfeeding in the developed world are not as clear cut as women are told
  • Looks at emerging evidence that the immense pressure to breastfeed is now a contributing factor to post-natal depression
  • Shows how sloppy science reporting, ill-informed websites and celebrity culture unfairly demonise bottle feeding, leaving mothers feeling like failures
  • Points out the double standards of a medical system which relentlessly pressures mothers to breastfeed, but doesn’t provide them with the support they need
  • Calls for an individually tailored ‘feeding plan’, to give mothers a realistic feeding goal rather than the blanket 6-month exclusive breastfeeding target, which 98% of UK mums fail to meet
  • Calls for a mother’s physical and mental needs to be valued in the feeding relationship
  • Reveals the ‘X-Factor’ of breastfeeding research, and why we may never know the differences between breastfed and formula-fed babies
  • Gives a large, detailed guide to choosing a formula, safe bottle preparation and how to bottle feed for maximum health and bonding – information which is shamefully lacking in the NHS.
Told with humour and personal experience yet grounded in years of fastidious research, Guilt-Free Bottle Feeding is a much needed real-world counterpoint to the almost religious promotion of breastfeeding which now dominates medical and parenting discourse.
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As mothers who both breast- and bottle-fed their babies (they met at their NCT class), and decorated professionals in their fields of journalism and paediatrics, Madeleine Morris and Dr Sasha Howard are uniquely placed to provide evidence-based reassurance to mothers they are not failures if they don’t exclusively breastfeed.
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Guilt-Free Bottle Feeding: Why your formula-fed baby can be happy, healthy and smart By Madeleine Morris & Dr Sasha Howard is available on Amazon for £7.59 (ISBN: 9781908281777), or in e-book format for £6.99 (ISBN: 9781908281784)
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*** GIVEAWAY ***

I haven’t read this book yet, but a copy is on its way to me. As someone who staunchly believes that breast isn’t always best and advocates pro-choice when it come to feeding your baby, I’m all for it.

If you’re currently bottlefeeding, pregnant, or just interested in the findings, you can win 1 of 5 copies right here. Just enter via the rafflecopter below.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

T&C’s – a.k.a – the boring bit!
    • Only 1 option is mandatory (leave me a comment) – the rest only improve your chances of winning so just complete as many as you feel like
    • UK entrants only – you must be over 18 too (sorry)
    • The winners will be contacted by email and must respond within 1 week of having been emailed (I’ll try all known avenues to contact them) or a new winner will be drawn
    • When the giveaway is closed, Rafflecopter will select the winner completely at random
    • The winners name will be published on this site

Win competitions at ThePrizeFinder.com

Jul 11 2014

Postnatal anxiety attacks

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Try as I might to take this blog in a serious direction for once, I probably won’t manage it. As I sit down to write this post I have every intention of sharing my experience of post-natal depression, and the debilitating panic attacks I’ve had since having Heidi. However, since this is such a departure from my usual care-free style, I suspect that I’ll wind up making a hash of it!

The truth is, I’ve given people reason to think I’m the biggest hypochondriac on the planet. Not a week goes by where we’re not beset by some disaster or another, or one of the family falls ill. I’m the sort of person who can make a headache sound like a tumor and I’m fully aware of this. But these panic attacks are in a league of their own and have really knocked me.

I’ve always been a bit of a happy loner. I love socialising, but only with people I know. Despite this, I’ve had customer-facing jobs and am a confident public speaker. Some might see this as a contradiction, I can only agree, but this is exactly how I’ve lived my life so far - all 30+ years of it. I’m at my happiest with Craig, Dexter and Heidi, but unfortunately this has a propensity to make me ill.

The whole saga started in 2012 when the midwife handed me Dexter. A bit of agoraphobia kicked in and I hated the faff of taking him out and about. The baby blues just didn’t seem to go away, and I wasn’t able to recover any of the energy I had before I was a mummy. Despite being treated for PND and feeling better emotionally, a little anxiety has stayed with me ever since. Until now this hadn’t manifested itself physically, I just tended to over think things and turn minor things into a drama.

Dexter

The PND came back (as I’m told is often the case) when Heidi was born. This time however I was quick to nip to the doctors and get myself medicated. As was the case with Dexter, the medication has made the world of difference. I now feel happy, confident and more capable with the kiddies. I’m no longer wallowing around the house and tearing up at the prospect of a entire day alone with the two of them. I now enjoy every second with them both and things are exactly as they should be.

So when the panic attacks started 6 weeks ago, I didn’t have a clue what was wrong with me. In fact, I’ve only just accepted anxiety as a diagnosis.

My first ever attack happened in bed with Craig. One minute we were talking about the kids, and they next I was in agony. It felt like I had trapped wind in my chest, yet within seconds I was struggling to breathe and writhing around in bed. I was sweating, my back was aching, and every movement hurt. I kept begging Craig not to let me die as it felt as though I was having a heart attack. After 2 minutes pacing around the bedroom and clutching at Craig in desperation, he called for an ambulance.

Whilst waiting for them to turn up, I was sick. The sense of relief was instantaneous and I felt like an idiot. Despite me trying to reassure the ambulance crew I was okay, they weren’t prepared to take my word for it and gave me oxygen, and an ECG in my living room. To rule out a blood clot and run more tests they took me into hospital. Shortly later my blood results and a chest x-ray suggested I was all-clear and I was sent packing.

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Believing this to be a one-off, I didn’t give it much thought until it returned 5 days later. Once again, I couldn’t catch my breath, my heart was racing, and I was sweating. Thinking it was a digestive problem, I made myself sick in the hope it would pass over again. But this time it didn’t work, and 10 minutes later we were back on the phone to the emergency services. But, once again, by the time they reached the house, it had abated.4

We had a long chat with the ambulance crew and they urged me to visit my doctor. They thought it could be a damaged esophagus from my c-section or even severe acid reflux. So I duly did as requested and was prescribed Omeprazole which is supposed to reduce the amount of acid in my stomach.

But the attacks have continued.

I’ve had so many now that they’ve become second nature. They seem to be completely random; occurring at any time of the day, and lasting anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour. Having now ruled out a digestive problem, I have little choice but to accept they’re postnatal anxiety attacks despite my feeling better than ever. My doctor is keen for me to try talking therapies but I’ve flat-out refused as I already know this won’t work for me. The next step is CBT which I’m just as dubious about but seems to offer a few practical tips for dealing with them when they arise.

So I thought I’d write this post to raise awareness of the problem, and advance the idea that might be a link between PND and anxiety attacks. There seems to real lack of information about it, despite anxiety among new mothers being rife in forums. The physical attacks however seem to be an under-investigated phenomenon.

I’ll let you all know how the CBT goes so you can consider it yourself if you’re in the same boat. Until then, I wondered, have any of you experienced panic attacks after giving birth? If so, I’d be really interested to hear your story.

 

Jun 2 2014

The Reality of Having Two Babies

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Having two babies is bloody harder than I’d ever envisaged, and today has been possibly the toughest one yet. In fact, thinking about it, all Monday’s are pretty dire. I’m still in blissful weekend mode where I wake up beside the man who helped me create my little miracles, and the man who bears most all responsibility for them at the weekends. It’s a bit of a shock-to-the-system when you hear Dexter screaming what I can only assume are toddler profanities and rattling his stair-gate like Lecter’s neighbour in Silence of the Lambs. Then there’s my beautiful newly birthed cherub in an odoriferous morning nappy laying beside me - eying up my breasts like an alcoholic who’s spotted out-of-date cast offs in ASDA’s grundon. At that very moment, you know you’re in for a crap day.

Yep, parenting two kids is tough. The midwife might as well have handed me twenty babies when she slipped my Heidi to me. All the sense of occasion was pretty much destroyed when she then whisked her away as “she’s gotta lot of poo on her, bless her… sit tight, I’ll just wipe the worst of it off”.

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Even before Heidi and I were discharged, I was finding it hard work. Whipping out boobs on-demand and dealing with 3am hysteria came hurtling back like a bad dream.

And Heidi wasn’t as ‘pretty’ as I thought she would be. I remember seeing right past all the baggy and peeling skin with Dexter and thinking he was the most beautiful baby ever to be born. But Heidi looked like she’d strolled right out of a scene from the Labyrinth. Don’t get me wrong, my daughter is gorgeous (…now she’s had a few weeks to grow into herself) - but there’s definitely an altogether different appreciation of #2,3,4 babies that most of us aren’t expecting.

Fair enough, there are ways to ‘cheat’ your way through the week - like leaving the kids in PJ’s throughout the day so they look bed-ready when daddy comes through the door, or fast-forwarding the evenings so it’s acceptable to grab a glass of wine at bang on five-o-clock. But it doesn’t work as a long-term solution and all too quickly you’re rocking back and forth in the garden (behind the Little Tykes monstrosity that you thought was such a good idea until you realised your kid believes it’s an actual house he can actually sleep in) clutching a packet of cigarettes and telling yourself you won’t start again ‘properly’, just have one or two when the stress gets too much.

Then there’s the guilt.

You can see your toddler isn’t quite as thrilled as you thought he’d be so you start forgiving the odd misdemeanor as he’s obviously “acting out”. But when you give that precious inch, that toddler will sprint out of your grasp like that fella out of the Virgin ads. All of a sudden you start believing your two-year-old is capable of deception more masterful than the kid from Problem Child. I’ve definitely lost Dexter to the dark-side and he’s now fully aware that the way to rouse mummy from the sofa when she’s breastfeeding is to pull out a wire from the back of the telly, rip out her plants, or take his nappy off and pee on the floor. If mummy is waning and is looking beaten, he’ll move it up a notch and swallow lego, coins or anything else that will have us all bundled into an ambulance.

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Toss in the fact that I’m still pretending to be Super-Mum and am still trying to find a few spare minutes in the evening to tick off reviews that are outstanding from 6 months ago, and it’s quickly apparent why a vein is bulging in my neck like Stressed Eric. It’s no wonder I’ve been hospitalised twice with a suspected blood clot that has turned out to be nothing more than severe acid reflux and panic attacks.

So yes, I’m back on anti-depressants and waiting patiently for them to kick in. I’m also now frantically ringing nurseries and waxing lyrical about my beautiful first-born in an attempt to disguise the fact he’s now so awful to me that I just can’t cope. Every time a nursery worker scoffs that “some ladies pop them on the waiting list at birth” I kick myself for not being so flippin organised.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the reality of having two babies. It’s terrifying, emotional, stressful, awful and very likely to get me sectioned. As much as I love my babies, I really really do, I cannot wait for them to morph into proper little people - toilet-trained, capable of asking me where babies come from, and no longer receiving draught milk but necking it out of the bottle and then sneaking it back into the fridge… Only then might I rediscover my sanity… and start begging Craig for another.

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