Genna feels her psychosis could have been identified sooner.
Transcript
I think if the midwife was more aware of the signs and symptoms of postpartum psychosis that it could’ve been picked up sooner. I think she was unaware. I think she knew about the extreme cases of psychosis in terms of delusions of hearing or seeing things that aren’t there, but there are a whole bunch of other signs that she didn’t ask whether I was having them, to diagnose me or not. I think she was also wanting to give me the space to experience the postpartum process as an individual and she was monitoring it.
She was concerned and she was monitoring me and checking up on me but – I’m really happy to have had a midwife who came and checked up on me and came to the house because my understanding is that women with obstetricians don’t get any checkups until six weeks postpartum, where I had a midwife at least coming in and I could call her. When we were in the emergency situation there was an emergency number that I had to call her and contact her and get her advice of which hospital to go to. So I’m very, very happy with my midwifery care but I think now she’s more aware of the signs of psychosis. And it is a rare illness. I think it’s like 1 in a thousand births, but at the same time I heard a statistic that that’s as common as having a baby with Down syndrome and there’s a lot of testing and financial resources put into determining whether a child has Down syndrome in utero and the same financial investments aren’t made into postpartum mental health and mental health around pregnancy.
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