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FAMILY


Parental burnout


Postpartum depression is a life changing diagnosis for a new parent. But many symptoms and experiences don’t get reported or are closely guarded and therefore, slip through the cracks.


by Kimberley Lipschus


Her husband has valiantly taken her two-year-old to the park to have some time out. The baby, still breast-feeding, has remained behind but has other ideas. She has shrieked and arched her back for the entire two protracted hours since the other two departed. Now mum feels nothing but sheer cliffs of exhaustion and when finally, utterly fatigued, her baby falls into a soundless sleep, she can’t get down the stairs fast enough. Tossing her two-hour old, ice-cold cup of tea down the sink, her nerves are shattered. No rest, no break, and her husband is due back with their toddler any minute. Her window of ‘rest’ squandered by the infant, she stares down the coalface of eight more hours before she can sleep. It is in this moment of despair that the voice starts, belligerent and puritanical, informing her that she’s a failure, useless. A bad mother. She flees from the voice out to the deck. It’s there she looks up, and sees


44 JUNE 2017


them. The strong beams that hold up the roof, just missing some rope, which she knows is coiled on the shelf in the garage. Sling it over, make a noose. It would be that easy. And then they’d all be free from the terrible mother who lives with them. The joyless wreck.


POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION’S COUSIN ‘Postpartum depression’ (PPD) and ‘anxiety’ are buzzwords and well, they should be. The impacts of a mother struggling with depression or anxiety are far reaching and the impacts can be intergenerational: mothers passing their experiences on to their children. Depressed mothers’ attachment to their babies changes the course of how a baby and mother bond. Not only are spousal relationships deeply altered, but there is often a spillover of the symptoms occurring in other family members. Partners of women suffering PPD have a much higher chance of a


similar diagnosis. What should be the most significant time in a new parent’s life is instead bleached of joy and whitewashed with trauma. There’s another side of the coin


called ‘parental burnout’, or ‘parental depletion’. This is the unpopular cousin of postpartum depression and anxiety. Dr. Oscar Serrallach (2017, unp.) is an integrative medical doctor who has addressed the broader health issues related to mothers (particularly those who have children later in life). He claims that these mothers are more likely to struggle “hormonally, nutritionally and emotionally”. Poor energy levels and mood disturbance could point to PPD but they can also be what he calls ‘postnatal depletion’. Serrallach poses that postnatal depletion looks like PPD but the two are in fact different. From a therapeutic perspective he notes that recovery depends upon “holistically addressing and attending to a mother’s biology, psychology and life-purpose”.


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