Dave and I met at university and married in 2000. We always planned to have children, and two years ago we found a little house in a moorland village near the sea, perfect for a family. We started trying for a baby in July last year, and I was pregnant by the end of the month. We were both ecstatically happy. We chose the name Susie for a girl.
I was fine throughout the pregnancy and carried on my work as a community staff nurse until about five weeks before giving birth. I suffered from back problems and had some physiotherapy but it isn't uncommon and just meant that I needed to take it easy.
My labour pains started on April 4 and it was all very exciting, if frightening. But 25 hours later I was still in labour and went into hospital. I burst into tears because we had planned a home birth, but the midwives were lovely and I felt in safe hands.
After 39 hours I had an epidural and Susie was born two hours later, back-to-back (with her head down but facing my abdomen) and I had to have an episiotomy (a perineum incision). I bled heavily and almost lost consciousness but when she was born it was absolutely fantastic. She was small and perfect and rosy. I felt immediately maternal.
However, because I didn't sleep at all during labour I started to become increasingly tired and less and less actively able to look after Susie. The following night I had to have a blood transfusion and then she developed colic and cried for what felt like 24 hours a day. I came home after three days but cannot remember much after that.
I breastfed from the word go and desperately wanted to carry on but because I was so tired I made the difficult decision to give up after four weeks. I began to feel down and convinced that I would never get better and sleep again. I would get half an hour here and there at most.
I became obsessed with sleep. Nothing seemed to work. Dave's and my parents came to stay and were wonderful. I tried to create a good sleep pattern but nothing seemed to work. I became increasingly desperate and on the edge.
Though my memory of this time is patchy, Dave says I never expressed any overtly negative emotions towards Susie, but I was indifferent a lot of the time. I was wrapped up in my own world and everything was about me. At that point I really wasn't doing much for her, just little things like a feed or a change. Sometimes I couldn't do anything at all and Dave and our families did everything.
At the end of the first month it was clear that I had post-natal depression but after six weeks it began to get worse. My negative thought processes became more surreal and disjointed. I was convinced I was going to end up in a psychiatric hospital for the rest of my life. At this point I started thinking that Dave and Susie would be better off without me.
I would call friends and family and tell them how dreadful my life was, which is very out of character for me. They were naturally concerned and would call Dave and tell him how worried they were.
I tried to kill myself for the first time around eight weeks after Susie was born. At that point I was mainly focusing on trying to get some sleep. We went to stay at Dave's parents' house while they stayed at our house with Susie so we could be in a peaceful environment. On one of these occasions, while Dave was asleep I walked into the kitchen and took tablets belonging to his mum. I just wanted to go to sleep and never wake up.
Somehow I survived the night. Dave is a paramedic and in the morning he immediately recognised the signs of an overdose. He took me to the nearest hospital where I was interviewed by psychiatric staff and discharged back to our local authority and a mental health team. At the time my only regret was that I had failed to kill myself.
Back home, Dave was able to take time off from work to look after me. One day he was in the shower and Susie was asleep. I took the car keys and went and started the engine. All I knew was that I was going to kill myself, even if I didn't know how. For some reason I came back and told Dave what I had done. At this point he bought a safe and locked everything dangerous in it.
Not long afterwards I tried to electrocute myself. Nothing happened. One day Dave was on the sofa asleep with Susie on his chest. His mum said something about how comfortable they looked and I believed that they would be better off without me. A few minutes later Dave came upstairs to find me vomiting in the bathroom. I had drunk bleach. I can't explain what was going through my mind at the time as I simply can't remember but Dave tells me that none of my thoughts appeared to be logical. He took me to hospital. I started vomiting blood in the car and he called and arranged for an ambulance to meet us halfway.
In the ambulance Dave was attempting to treat me but I was convinced that he and the other crew were torturing me. When I arrived in hospital they gave me milk but because it tasted funny I thought they were poisoning me.
I became convinced that everyone was out to get me on a governmental level. I thought Dave was a robot or someone pretending to be him. In the hospital there was a sign saying the floor was slippery and I imagined that they had deliberately made it dangerous to kill me so I began trying to navigate the room using just chairs.
The following day I was sectioned and taken to a psychiatric hospital. My delusions were very vivid and everyone agreed immediately that I was suffering from puerperal psychosis or post-partum psychosis (PP), a condition that affects about 1 in 700-1,000 women soon after giving birth.
Because Susie wasn't with me at that stage I believed I had killed her. As I was being wheeled into the ambulance I began banging my head convinced that she was dead and I was going to be tortured for it.
I stayed in the psychiatric hospital for 10 days with a few hours' leave here and there. I was placed on anti-psychotic drugs and slowly started to improve. One time when my mother visited me I imagined her looking evil with yellow teeth.
On my first day's leave Dave and I went for a trip to Padstow and I felt much better. I was so happy to be out and he was so pleased to see me that way that he didn't really notice that I was behaving manically. I spent too much money and suggested that we had lunch at Rick Stein's restaurant, something I would never normally do. The warning signs were there but the relief at feeling positive took precedence.
During this time, despite being an atheist, I became obsessed with ideas about Christianity and had an overwhelming desire to read the Bible. I remembered a saint who had her eyes taken out as punishment and I began talking about poking mine out. The Bible fuelled my delusions and I descended into thoughts of hell and damnation.
Quite early on in my diagnosis somebody had suggested electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and at this stage I started to think it might be the answer. Understandably, Dave was worried about it but the psychiatrist said it would be a good idea. I had six treatments, with a general anaesthetic, each lasting around half an hour. After the first one my mood lifted straight away and my delusions disappeared. I dipped slightly but after the second one I began to stabilise.
One of the side-effects of the treatment was short-term memory loss and I once even asked Dave whether we had a baby. There is a video of us on the beach and I sound and seem normal but I have no recollection of it.
The ECT isn't a long-term treatment and it's not uncommon to relapse. That terrifies me but I am on anti-depressants and also anti-psychotic drugs, the latter of which I hope to come off in a month's time. I already feel lots better but I think it will take a long time to come to terms with what happened. I do feel a huge amount of guilt that Susie missed out on me in the early months. My health visitor has arranged a counselling session to talk about the birth as I think this will help. I have spent the past month simply getting to know my baby and acting like a real mother at last. It's wonderful to have come out the other side.
I feel passionately that if my husband and I had known more about the condition sooner we would have got the appropriate help earlier. PP is more likely to affect people with a pre-existing mental illness, such as depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia and it is vital that health professionals are alert to its presentation, particularly as it is, thankfully, relatively rare. There is light at the end of the tunnel though, and I am starting to see it.
• Rachel Brand is a pseudonym. She was speaking to Hazel Davis. All names have been changed.
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