After having her baby, Genna and her partner were trying to figure out if she had baby blues or psychosis.
Transcript
They were, I mean I think they knew that postpartum there’s a lot of hormones that happen and it was my partner’s first time and my first time ever seeing a woman in their postpartum period. So we knew to expect some hormones, some tears, things like that but I think we didn’t know how to tell what was normal postpartum mood swings and what was signs of psychosis. So we started kind of self-diagnosing myself with the baby blues or started to think maybe it was postpartum depression and we had a meeting with my midwife. She came to the house and my parents did bring up possible postpartum mania.
My midwife, she kind of had extreme views of what postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis were. She said things to look for was if I had depression I was stopping brushing my teeth, I was stopping showering –really extreme signs of depression. And in terms of psychosis, she asked, “Was I hearing things? Was I seeing things?” Again, that’s very extreme signs of psychosis. Whereas I was expressing a lot of other signs that could’ve helped us diagnose postpartum psychosis that she didn’t ask whether I was having this kind of religious connection is a common sign of postpartum psychosis.
Other signs were I was having these grand ideas about how I could profit and make money out of what I was going through, so I started documenting everything. I was taking pictures, I was taking videos and I thought that this experience I was having I’d be able to create a blog or an experiential art project that would make me rich and these ideas that I could get rich off of. . .I had a theme around apples that I was building up and it had to do with apples being the source of life from the garden of Eden. And that, that was linked to Apple devices because I was using an iPad and an iPhone to document my story and so I had this idea that if we put all of our money into Apple stock, we would get rich and yeah. As they were building a self-driving car, so I told my partner, “Put all of our money into Apple. We need to do that,” and that again was a sign of psychosis, like spending spree tendencies.
And so they told me that at that point and at that point I’d had no suicidal thoughts or any negative thoughts towards my child but that kind of planted a seed in my brain. So when I did come home, I started seeing some symbols of my daughter being possessed by the devil.
So normal things that infants do like she rolled her eyes in the back of her head and projectile vomited and normal things that babies do but there was the flash and the thought in my mind that she was possessed by the devil and so that’s when things started to become scary. So I told the psychiatrist this and they did have a crisis team come to the house and assess the situation. I was really fortunate that I did have family who could be with me and some women don’t have that. I think things could’ve turned ugly really quickly if I didn’t have that family support.
So the psychiatrist recommended that I be on 24 hour watch.
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