This week I watched a TV programme where Louis Theroux spoke to women in a mother- and-baby psychiatric unit about their varying experiences of post-natal psychosis and depression. These women were on the most severe end of the spectrum, hence their being admitted to full-time care, often under section. I found the programme upsetting to watch because it chimed with what I know of my mother’s experience, although at the time her condition was largely unrecognised and almost never treated.

Though even less understood, there are as many women who suffer from depression during pregnancy as post-natally, and frequently both. My mother was first officially diagnosed with clinical depression in 1958, when she was pregnant with me. She was in her early thirties and had been married to my father for six years, during which time she had been trying not to get pregnant, always insisting that she did not want to be a mother. But my father’s persistence, along with the vagaries of the ‘rhythm method’ contraception they used, meant that she had already conceived once, losing the baby at three months. I don’t know how she felt about that miscarriage – perhaps because of her ambivalence it was a a relief, though she was very angry with my father for abandoning her in hospital to go off on a business trip the next day.

My mother always blamed the hormonal changes of pregnancy for triggering severe depression, as she experienced it every time she became pregnant, but I doubt it was purely a physical or chemical process. Being effectively co-erced into motherhood against her will, with the underlying social expectation that being a mother was the most, if not only, fulfilling life choice for a woman, must have been a grim experience. Of course if she’d had her way I would not have been born, which I can’t wish for, but it’s clear that our whole relationship and the course of my life has been marked by the fallout from this unhappy time.

What is it like to be a baby in the womb of a depressed mother? There is some evidence* that such babies are more likely to experience depression themselves in later life, though it’s not clear whether this is genetic, environmental, or due to changes in foetal development from the mother’s depression. I also got very depressed for a time during pregnancy, even though I had spent five years being treated for infertility, so my son’s conception (through IVF) was much longed-for.  Perhaps my brain chemistry was triggered in a similar way to my mother’s, or perhaps external events – my relationship with my husband was very difficult and distant at this stage, which meant I felt very alone – contributed to feeling low when I might have been expecting to feel very happy.

Things didn’t get any better for my mother after I was born: the birth was very traumatic as I came out three weeks’ late, very large and she had to be cut in order for me to be born. The gas and air she was given for pain relief made her hallucinate and this, combined with her own anxiety and terror, convinced her that there was something seriously wrong with me and she refused to see me for the first twenty-four hours. Even when my father persuaded her that all was well and I was a healthy and beautiful baby, she still believed that I was somehow damaged. She later described it – to me – as ‘the worst day of my life’.

When I watched some women in the programme say that they were able to feel nothing for their babies, even though they seemed to be caring for them perfectly adequately, I understood that I had probably been on the receiving end of this maternal indifference. How terrible must it feel not to love your own baby? Luckily for me I bonded instantly with my son and loved him to distraction. As a small baby I at least had my father and grandmother, who we lived with, both doting on me, and I look perfectly cheerful in all the photographs. My mother was obsessive about my physical care, especially cleanliness – apparently she bathed me and washed my long hair every day. However I never felt that I had bonded properly with her until towards the very end of her life, when she became like a child herself. It’s not her fault, or mine, but there’s a loneliness inside me, a sense of never having been properly received on earth, that I have never managed to assuage.

*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3710585/