Each year at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, the American Psychiatric Foundation hosts an interview with a public figure regarding his or her experience with mental illness.
The guest at this year's meeting in San Diego was Brooke Shields, who has written about her ordeal with postpartum depression in the book, "Down Came the Rain."
She described for the audience how much she had craved having a baby and the experience of motherhood. She and her husband had struggled for pregnancy and repeatedly experienced hope and failure with in vitro fertilization.
Life was especially stressful when she finally was able to maintain the pregnancy with her first child. Her father recently had died. She worried about miscarriage because of her previous failures. Ultimately she required an emergency cesarean section, and the baby was jaundiced and needed a hip brace.
Although Brooke had high expectations of maternal bliss, her experience was the exact opposite. At first she felt nothing for the baby. Then came a growing sense that she was a failure as a mother - her most important role. She told the gathered group that she had felt more affection at age 15 for the baby in the movie, "The Blue Lagoon," than she did for her own long-awaited child.
Everyone told her that it was just the baby blues and that things would get better soon. Instead, they got much worse. She told the pediatrician that she had made a great mistake in having a baby and that she needed an exit plan due to her complete failure as a mother.
However, she felt insulted and angry at the suggestion that it might be postpartum depression. It was a long time before she agreed to try an antidepressant. In her mind she had lost the baby, but didn't want to lose her husband, too. She said that she took the medicine only to prove that everyone was wrong and the medication wouldn't make any difference.
The antidepressant did help, but she soon stopped because she was feeling a little better and she assumed she no longer needed it. But it wasn't long before she began to feel even more depressed. She had thoughts of ending her life. She could not block out visions of harming the baby.
One day she decided to crash her car, but didn't do it because her daughter was with her. Eventually she again took antidepressant medications and recovered fully. She finally realized that the antidepressants were life-saving for her.
With her second baby three years later she was able to benefit from her past experience and new insights. She took an antidepressant preventively. All went well and she was able to feel the maternal love she had expected the first time.
Brooke Shields felt that being in the public eye heightened her feeling of failure at being a mother, but she later made good use of her celebrity to educate others about depression. She has been a hero in the mental health field for disclosing her past despair and confusion so that others could benefit.
She has worked to raise the public awareness about postpartum depression so that women can understand their own symptoms and so that others in their lives can be persistent in making sure that they get appropriate evaluation and treatment.
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