Joanna Friend, from Woodbury, near Exeter, Devon, first experienced depression and anxiety five days after the birth of her first son: “I started feeling an intense anxiety, and I went downhill very fast – I was lying on the floor crying and asking for people to help me. It got so bad a friend said I needed to call the mental health crisis team.”
With no specialist care available Friend, now 36, was given tranquillisers and antidepressants, which required her to stop breastfeeding. After six months she was able to go off medication, only to relapse 18 months later, when she became pregnant with her younger son.
“I woke up feeling really sick and I felt all the anxiety coming back, and this time it was even worse. I was almost catatonic, lying on the floor in the kitchen. No one could make me speak or move.”
With no mother and baby units in her area – the closest is in Poole, Dorset – Friend spent a week on a standard psychiatric unit, which she remembers being far from suitable: “Because I was still being sick all the time I was needing to eat little and often,” she recalls. “I went to the kitchen to ask for some toast and the chef said: ‘No, nothing between mealtimes.’ I told him I was pregnant. He said: “I’ve heard that before.’ ”
Staff from a new specialist team intervened to send Friend home, prescribing antidepressants. Again, the recovery was mixed: “I never got fully well when I was pregnant, but about 10 weeks after the birth I was completely back to normal again. I stayed on the drugs for two and a half years and started to wean off, but when I got to a low level I had a massive relapse.
“I went back on the drugs and they didn’t work, and had to go through all sort of different drugs till I found one that did. It’s only really in the last month I’ve recovered from that relapse.”
Friend in part blames the long wait for psychotherapy: “I only had my assessment a month ago – my sons are seven and four – and I’m now on a two-year waiting list. If, after I’d had the eldest, I could have had talking therapy, when I came off my drugs I would have had some strategies to fall back on when I started to relapse.”
The experience has affected her. “I’m thinking that I won’t have any more children. I always wanted loads of children, but my episodes are so severe we just think the threat to the family is too great.”
