Bipolar after Baby: When Motherhood Triggers Mental Illness

What happens when the joyful arrival of a baby triggers an unexpected mental health crisis? When Susan returned home with her newborn, she was in a manic state. Fueled by little sleep with an infant to care for, her behavior became erratic--rushing around the house, even handling her baby carelessly. Her husband David told Susan that it felt like he was suddenly living with two strangers--a wife he didn't recognize and a child he didn't yet know.

It would take their doula's observation and advice that Susan was not just a fatigued new mother, but that she needed immediate help.

However, without effective treatment, Susan went back to work completely manic, losing her job. She would then alternate between a depressive fog and a manic state, ultimately landing her at McLean hospital for a harrowing three week stay. Rebuilding her life would include ECT, years on disability, and finally getting care from expert providers.

Susan's mothering instinct now shines through by coaching those living with bipolar disorder and helping them design lives and careers. Perhaps most movingly, Susan developed a profound bond with her child, now eighteen years old despite such rough early years.

At the top of the show I mention Susan's dedication to Bipolar Social Club, and online support group with weekly meetings, special programming and an online discussion board. As a member, I am grateful for the support BSC offers!

Transcript

Introduction to Susan's Journey

Speaker 1 0:00

Welcome to Bipolar she. I'm your host, janine Noel. Before we get started, the content of this show does include suicide and suicidal ideation. If you are ever in need of immediate support, please dial 988-SUICIDE-AND-CRISIS-LIFELINE. I believe in the healing power of writing and speaking our mental health stories and all their raw details. So let's go. This episode is brought to you by the Soar with Tapping app, created by expert EFT coach and friend of the show, amy Vinsa. If you're navigating anxiety, trauma or just trying to feel more grounded, tapping is a powerful, science-backed tool that can help calm your nervous system and gently release the emotional weight you've been carrying. Amy's guided sessions in the app make it very simple to start healing right from your phone. Visit the Soar with Tapping app in Apple or Google Play stores and start your journey towards freedom With the help of IVF.

Pregnancy Complications and Hospital Stay

Speaker 1 1:13

At 34, susan was finally pregnant, but when she delivered her baby, her world changed. She was suddenly manic, with frenetic energy, but detached from her husband and infant. She was suffering from peripartum onset bipolar in this case, bipolar disorder that occurs after delivery Through job loss, hospitalization, ect and, ultimately, time and better care. Susan's life came together and she's been able to share what she has learned along the way. She is an incredible volunteer with Bipolar Social Club, an online support group with weekly meetings, special programs and a lively discussion board about making it day by day with this illness, and Susan's a coach for both those living with bipolar illness and for families needing guidance when a loved one is ill. Most importantly, as a mother, her bond with her now 18-year-old, couldn't be stronger. Welcome Susan. Hi Susan, how are you? Welcome to the show? Thank you, janine. Thank you so much for having me, so I'm just going to launch into this. I do this with every guest. I ask them to tell me a mental health story.

The Onset of Postpartum Mania

Speaker 2 2:37

My mental health story really started at about somewhere between 18 and 20 years ago or so. Really started at about somewhere between 18 and 20 years ago or so, I thought, when I was traveling for work. I live in Boston and I traveled to St Louis for a week for a biomedical conference and I was pregnant at the time. But I was cleared to travel and then in the middle of the conference I was starting to have contractions, which wasn't good, and then I realized I had some bleeding which wasn't good, and so I called my husband and he called our hospital and then he called me back and so I was sent in an ambulance to the hospital in St Louis one of the hospitals there and there was really big concern that I was going to deliver prematurely. So they wanted me to lie in bed and not move, and you know what's funny is that it was actually a really lovely time. I was there for six weeks trying not to move. My husband came and stayed with me the whole time and friends came out to visit me, which was really great. I had Hanukkah in bed, my friends brought a menorah and all seemed well and I delivered six weeks early. But okay, a little bit premature, but fine, it was a bit of a difficult delivery. So we ended up doing a C-section and then a week later, after delivering my, my baby, we went home to Boston and that's when everything changed.

Speaker 2 4:11

They had cautioned me and my husband that I really needed to take it easy, given everything that I had been through physically and emotionally. But physically, and right from day one, I was like rushing up and down the stairs, rushing up and down the stairs, rushing up and down the stairs, and my husband was like, susan, you're supposed to be in bed, what are you doing? And I'm like, oh no, it's fine, it's all fine, I'm good, I'm excited, I'm happy. I wasn't sleeping at all, in part because of the baby, but in part because of what turned out to be pregnancy-induced bipolar, and this was not something I had ever heard of before and this was not something I had ever heard of before. My doctor told me it's not that uncommon in the pregnancy world and it's often misdiagnosed as postpartum depression or a piece of postpartum depression. And I mean, my husband was just dismayed, confused the way he describes it is. He felt like he came home with two strangers this new baby that he didn't know and this wife that he did not recognize at all and he was very worried when he saw me start to handle our child and at one point he actually took the baby away from me because I was being so careless that he was worried I was going to drop the baby or hit the baby on the head with the door. It was really bad and it wasn't until we had set up to have a doula help us. And it wasn't until the doula said to my husband I think something's going on here. I think your wife needs to be checked out.

Speaker 2 5:46

Then my kid, my little baby, came down with something that's called pyloric stenosis, basically the little tube between your stomach and your digestive system. There's a muscle around it and the muscle had contracted so food wasn't passing and so the baby was throwing up, turning green, turning blue, very scary. So my craziness, or whatever I was doing, went on the back burner. We went to another hospital and so there was just so much going on and it was so separate from the pregnancy I think I mean the other bipolar folks that I speak to there's so much going on that it's very hard to pinpoint anything, one thing that makes you say you know, it's not like a stroke, we're like, oh my God, you are clearly in distress. It's so borderline that it's really hard to pick up on. So we persevered through.

Speaker 2 6:45

I did not get immediate treatment. I went back to work after. Had I known I was bipolar, I would have taken a medical leave. This is one of those areas where I get kind of pissed off because had I known that it was bipolar, right, it would have all been so different. I would have taken a medical leave for six months until I could get new meds and get on a program and working with a doctor. But I didn't. Nobody knew what it was, or it just got passed by.

Speaker 2 7:18

So I went back to work and I was I mean, I was full blown manic at this point and I had a boss that I did not love and it was review time, when we all do our team reviews, and I did his review very nicely and then, like, just like a week later, I was like I'm getting back at this guy, I'm getting back at this guy and I sent this long email to my more senior boss and she was totally confused and she's like I don't understand why you didn't put this in the original evaluation.

Career Impact and Job Loss

Speaker 2 7:54

And why is this coming now and why is it so have so much energy behind it, like what is going on? And since I had been back, I was not performing very well, and so we go off site, we do the quarterly review. At the end of that day my boss comes up to me and says I need to talk to you back at the office. If you could just go find me there, that'd be great. He said no, no, no, I'll wait for you in your office. I said sure, of course, I thought he was going to be saying listen, we kind of need to talk about what you did and there would be some kind of conversation. And so I got back to the office and there was a post-it on my door that said meet me in the Emerson conference room. And I did, and he was sitting there with someone from HR and I was fired, okay. And there's also the dynamic that my husband has always worked in nonprofit. I've always worked on the corporate side.

Speaker 2 8:55

I wasn't the primary breadwinner, but I was the better breadwinner and so that income went out the door and it was just so confusing and shameful. I was just so embarrassed. I mean hearing people I really respect super smart, super talented, and it was just so embarrassing.

Speaker 1 9:17

So Susan, I just want to check in here. So you go back to work, and how long after having your baby does this happen at work?

Speaker 2 9:28

You know, janine, that's a really good question and I don't know exactly, right. It must have been at least a month or two, right? Because most pregnancy leave is a month or two. So, yeah, it was probably a couple of months after delivery, right? So there's two months that I could have been better helped medically better helped medically.

Speaker 1 9:53

Do you remember during that time? I know some of us remember thoughts during manic episodes and for others it's kind of a blur. Do you remember any thoughts that you had during that time?

Speaker 2 10:01

So I feel like when we're, when we're manic and sometimes hypomanic, you know that feeling of I deserve better. Right, I was not. It might have helped if I were in a place of oh my God, you're right. I'm so sorry, I need to apologize. I might still be fired, but it would have helped. And I was in that place of I deserve better than this. I can do better than you. That real polarized place. That's all I remember. I do not remember thinking, huh, this isn't like me, like why am I thinking this way? Which, as we progress, right, we get better at kind of checking in with ourselves.

Speaker 1 10:40

So do you remember your connection to the baby and how that was going?

Speaker 2 10:46

That's a really hard question because I didn't really have a connection with my baby and it's something that I've always I've had this lingering thought of if I never connected with my little kid as a preemie or as a baby, I would never have that connection. I'm doomed from the beginning. I'm never going to have that bond. I don't know, I think a lot of moms maybe have that concern and of course that was not what happened. My kid is I can't believe it going to college in a couple of months and we couldn't be closer. We're very, very we're. We're very in sync with one another. We're very close.

Speaker 2 11:32

So I kind of want to say that to anybody out there who has that concern, that it was a year that I wish had gone differently, but it did not change the course of my relationship with my kid. But I do kind of mourn that I didn't have that time. I didn't my my milk never came in because they couldn't breastfeed. I had really wanted that. I had really hoped for that. So it was not the first year with my baby that I would have wanted.

Speaker 1 11:58

And does it feel like your manic symptoms were there the first time after you delivered the baby, or can you see them have existing before the pregnancy?

Speaker 2 12:11

Yeah, and that's a big part of why I'm here and wanted to do this podcast with you, because I think, in addition to the contract work that I do, I'm looking for a new full-time role and just decided to go back through my entire work history and it's just so clear when you look at where I was in a job getting great rave reviews, then a few months later, something really goes wrong, and then I'm fired, and this pattern five times.

Speaker 2 12:45

I went through this pattern and I've lost so much ground. There are people who, when I was VP in advertising, who used to report to me and I see them on LinkedIn and they're all EVPs, partners of agencies, and I'll never have that. And the reason I feel like doing this is so important is I really and, as you know, I'm doing some coaching for bipolar folks I really want to try to contract that timeline, a regimen that actually works, and so that's why, in my work, my goal is to really condense all of that for folks so that they don't lose out as much time as I, unfortunately, did.

Speaker 1 13:40

So when you get fired from that job, what happens?

Hospitalization and Treatment Experience

Speaker 2 13:44

So again, it is a little fuzzy. So my husband asked for separation two years after delivering my baby. He just couldn't deal with it anymore. So I moved out and I tried to get other jobs along the way, but ultimately I ended up going on disability. So I was on disability for seven years. I started my own business, kind of doing my own thing at my own pace.

Speaker 1 14:16

So when were you first prescribed meds and really went into treatment?

Speaker 2 14:22

And we were living in Newton, an area outside of Boston, and I was just running around. I thought I was an avatar in a video game and I didn't know what was going on. And I finally found a piece of cardboard and I wrote on the cardboard am I manic? And then I knocked on his front door and he saw the sign and he just looked at me. He said yes, you are. So that's when I was first hospitalized. I was in the hospital for two weeks three weeks, I think that's right and that was really hard.

Speaker 2 15:03

So I was at McLean Hospital, which is revered to be one of the best institutions for mental health in, I think, the country. It's affiliated with Harvard University. It was not a good experience, from what I remember, but the hardest part was when David brought our kid in to see me. So there were four or five at this point and I didn't want my kid seeing me this way. But, David, I said what did you say? And he said I just, I just said that you have a chemical, there's some chemical problem in your body and they're trying to figure it out. And I loved the specificity of that and I loved the zero judgment of that, just giving it the medical kind of diagnosis. I was really grateful for that. And then I started seeing a psychiatrist who prescribed as well as a therapist. So I had a therapist and a prescriber and I was massively depressed in bed 18 hours a day. Right, I'm all alone at this point.

Speaker 1 16:17

You were discharged to go home alone alone at this point.

Speaker 2 16:24

You were discharged to go home alone. No, so I was discharged with the understanding that my ex, my husband, was going to be checking in on me and so technically I wasn't discharged alone, but I was living in my space, he was living in his space and I wasn't working. I had nothing going on. I started an IOP intensive outpatient program, so that's just a support group online of eight people led by a therapist and it gives you some tools and some structure to your week, and that was. I found that to be helpful.

Speaker 2 16:53

But I wasn't making significant strides and my psychiatrist started kind of dropping the hints of you know, maybe it's time to try ECT, maybe when you think about ECT. So ECT is electroconvulsive therapy, and I'll just say I'm in marketing and branding and freaking could use a new name. Like that is not helpful. But be that as it may, and I really trusted him, I trusted my doctor a lot, and so I tried it and it takes a while to take hold. I ended up doing 14 rounds, which is quite a bit, but ultimately it did help and I did get out of bed and start being a little bit more productive in my days. But ECT is rough. It's rough going through it and I still have memory lapses as a result of it. So very often when I'm walking through a door I'll bang against the side of the door because I can't judge spatially. I have it with my car too. I have to be really careful when I park because sometimes I'm not in the lines. It just. It definitely has an effect.

Speaker 1 18:04

Is that? Did a doctor say that spatial awareness is impacted, or is that just something you discovered?

Speaker 2 18:12

The only thing that my doctor warned me about is memory. That can have significant impact on short-term memory.

Speaker 1 18:19

So when you say lingering memory issues, is it the long-term memory or the short-term memory?

Speaker 2 18:25

So there are whole swaths of my life that I don't remember. I don't remember either of my parents' funerals. I don't remember and I spoke, I gave the eulogy at my mother's funeral and I at one point I was going through my computer and I found the eulogy and I could not remember, recall any of it. So there are periods and moments I just cannot recall. And then at this point I don't know if it's age or ECT or what it is, but definitely more challenges, which is hard right. So if you're in my line of business, I'm a consultant and I can't remember what my client has told me and I can't take ferocious notes all the time In every meeting. It's a trade-off, and there are a lot of crappy, crappy trade-offs when it comes to bipolar, in my opinion.

Speaker 1 19:11

Did you share custody of your kid at that point?

Speaker 2 19:26

we never got divorced. Legally I'm still married and we have a pretty unusual arrangement and I'm sharing this because so many of the people that I work with go through a very similar relationship challenge with their partner. So David and I separated for five years. After five years, levin, our kid, was having some challenges and we were a little worried about them and we made the decision to move out of very, very expensive Newton and go further west to Framingham, where we are now. We got a bigger house.

Speaker 2 19:58

To Framingham, where we are now, we've got a bigger house and it's kind of an unconventional thing. You know, david has his room, I have my room, I have my study, he has his study. There's sort of we really live as roommates and I'm sharing that in part to say there are other ways to make it work. But David, I mean, I got to give him credit. He could have dropped me like a hot potato and he didn't. He felt like the right thing to do and he still cared about me as a person. I was family to him as he is to me, and he was willing to give it another try in a very different format when did you finally feel steady again?

Finding Stability and Recognizing Warning Signs

Speaker 2 20:44

So I hadn't felt steady until about two years ago, and then I was having oh, I was having trouble with neuropathy, just you know that burning tingling of your skin. And the doctor didn't read my file, I don't think, and this is so interesting to me. He prescribed gabapentin, which is a drug that some doctors use for bipolar, but it made me suicidal. It was really bad, and that's what sucks about this condition is that gabapentin is very helpful to a lot of bipolars. To me it was awful. Once I got past that scare, I would say I have been more or less stable. Part of it, too, is I'm quicker to act on any signs that I see. I know now what my signs of hypomania are, whereas before I didn't know what the signs are. Then I knew what the signs were and I ignored them, and now I know what the signs are and I pay attention to them. Right, a lot of us go through that, that three-step process.

Speaker 1 21:59

What are some of the behaviors at the top of the list that make you sit and go? Oh, this could be a little bit of mania. This could be some depression. Are there specific behaviors?

Speaker 2 22:12

Yep, so right. We all know pressed speech right and talking too fast, right Again. Our doctors, all our doctors, talk about that. If I stop closing doors, so like I'll. If I come back, there are doctors, all the doctors talk about that. If I stop closing doors, so like I'll. If I come back into the kitchen and all the cabinet doors are open, I know there's something's going on Typing really fast, texting really fast, dropping my phone, a lot bumping into things. I also sometimes have more flourishes, signs of grandiosity, but dropping my phone and the cabinets are probably the most the earliest indicators for me that I need to slow down. For me, depressive is much, much harder. Depressive just hits. There's very little ramp up on that and it's when you want to be in bed. It is really, really hard, and I know this working with my clients. You know it's really really hard and I know this working with my clients. You know it's, it's, it's very, very hard, it's very hard.

Speaker 1 23:06

Yeah, I understand, and you know anyone listening. They're like well, I dropped my iPhone, I leave kitchen cabinets open, right, these are just normal. They're just normal human things, but they've come to have some meaning in our life and it's good. They're cues. I think that's really important, that you've gotten so specific with that. So this is 18 years now out from your first manic episode. So how are you feeling and what kind of work do you do now?

Speaker 2 23:42

I started out doing consulting and then I kind of broadened into having a small advertising agency. I've been ramping up on being a coach, sort of a health navigator for folks who are bipolar and their family. So I've helped a couple of folks find their way to inpatient hospital treatment, worked with some other folks on getting into an outpatient program.

Coaching Others and Final Reflections

Speaker 1 24:10

You've been through so much and you do this incredible work, particularly working with bipolar folks trying to find jobs and those also in crisis, and you work with their families, so you're even giving quite a bit back to this community. The postpartum bipolar was something new to me to learn about, but then when I looked into it, it's not hugely uncommon. I mean, it can happen to two to three percent of women. It's a hard story to share, but I think it's a very helpful story and so I really appreciate you sharing that today.

Speaker 2 24:52

Thank you for being such a lovely host and including me in this. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 24:59

Well, thank you very, very much.

Speaker 2 25:02

Thank you for all that you are doing in the community. It's really so important.

Speaker 1 25:06

We got to just we got to do something right I know, Hi, it's Janine Bipolar. She is currently an independent podcast. I'm its writer, producer and host. Please consider this podcast as a work of advocacy, getting important stories to those that need them. As we gather ideas how to keep the show running financially, please do engage with the podcast wherever you find it. Offer up some stars and some likes. You can visit us at VipolarShecom or at VipolarShePod on Instagram and thank you, as always, for your support.