After a traumatic birth and having experienced two previous losses, Karmin believed she just needed some time to cope with the baby blues.

Transcript

So the moment I first suspected something was wrong with my mental health, I started to experience some anxiety at the beginning of my pregnancy as it was my third pregnancy and I had two losses prior, I wouldn’t say that I had, like an anxiety disorder at that time. I feel like situationally it was kind of expected, but I wouldn’t consider it, like, a full-blown mental illness. Maybe closer to the end of my pregnancy the anxiety was a lot higher that it was causing quite a bit of symptoms as well as it was kind of disrupting my, like, daily activities of living, as well as the – it was kind of double sided with some depression as well. Just because it was a big life change coming up for me, at which I was excited for, but also I was grieving almost at the same time of what my life used to be like and how much change was going to be happening. And it was kind of hard to deal with feeling depressed when something that’s the most exciting part of your life going to be taking place.

I kind of figured that these things would maybe go away once I had my baby and what my baby – my baby would be safe in my arms, I thought maybe those kind of feelings and the symptoms of that and everything would go away when I was safe in my arms, but when I had her, I had, like, a pretty traumatic birth and my – I had a bad infection and my daughter had jaundice and things were kind of scary around that time, and I was experiencing a lot of depression then, and it was kind of – I was being told there was, like, baby blues, it’s normal and whatnot. And I would describe my traumatic experience to people, and a lot of the times I would get the saying of, well at least you have a healthy baby. And I found that to be, like, pretty detrimental to my experience and it wasn’t very validating of what I went through.

And then, like, later on, like, I was kind of just giving myself some time through it, and you know, going through – kind of going through that stage of baby blues, you know. But I was kind of expecting it to kind of go on for maybe, like, two or three weeks at max. But then it kind of started to keep going on and I was kind of like, I don’t really know if this is just baby blues. It kind of started to kind of turn into more so postpartum depression, but then I also had a lot of anxiety because now my baby was – exposed to the outside of the world and I had a lot of anxiety about, you know, SIDS and things like that happening, and I lost a lot of sleep and I kind of stopped taking care of myself.

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