'Thousands of women will have had this - but we had no idea until we were rushed to mental wards'
manchestereveningnews.co.uk‘I would see flashes out of the corner of my eye, hearing whispers, hallucinating’, says 44-year-old Hannah. ‘There was a day I was crouched in the bath like a baby, my father found me like that’, explains Karen, 63.
The eerily similar stories of two mothers, decades apart. Neither had ever heard of the condition they would soon learn they had – until they were rushed to psychiatric wards, being told they were in a medical emergency.
Almost all families will be familiar with the ‘baby blues’ which leave new mothers feeling tearful and down, some will know the grief of postnatal depression.
But postpartum psychosis remains a complete unknown for so many – despite affecting some 1 in 500 births. In years gone by, little information was available about the serious mental illness that can rapidly set in after birth.
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