In Episode 4 of See Me: The Podcast, Myria and Genevieve interview Leah about her postpartum depression and dysphoric milk-ejection reflex, what inspired her to publish a chapbook of poetry--which is forthcoming from Chestnut Review and was written during that time of PPD--and what she hopes for the future. In the podcast, they address some of the stigma those who have postpartum face, as well as the misperceptions caused by the sensationalization of violence--like in the case of Lindsay Clancy.
The podcast hosts Myria and Genevieve discuss postpartum depression in light of the Lindsay Clancy case. They highlight the severity of postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, emphasizing the challenges faced by women and people with these conditions. The hosts mention the stigma and misunderstanding surrounding postpartum depression and discuss the sensationalism of cases involving mothers accused of violence. They touch on the potential role of the husband in the Lindsay Clancy case and the broader societal perceptions of mental illness and motherhood. A guest, Leah, shares her personal experience with postpartum depression and the importance of seeking help. Leah discusses the hormonal and psychological aspects of postpartum depression and the need for support and understanding. She emphasizes the role of education and awareness in managing postpartum depression. Leah also talks about her forthcoming poetry collection written during her postpartum. Myria: Hello, friends, and welcome to the fourth episode of See Me, the Podcast. If you've been following us, welcome back. Thank you for returning, and if you're new with us, welcome, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Myria. Genevieve: And I'm Genevieve. The main purpose of our podcast is to bring awareness to non-apparent disabilities and the people who live with them. Just a reminder that we are not medical professionals, nor are we experts on any type of disabilities that we discuss on our podcast. We're simply here to spread awareness, share our stories, and help others share their stories. Myria: So today, in light of the Lindsay Clancy case that's been all over the news and social media recently, today we really wanted to talk about postpartum depression. A lot of women who have or have dealt with postpartum depression have varying degrees of it. Postpartum depression is described as a serious mood disorder that can happen after a person has a baby. It brings intense feeling of sadness, anxiety, and extreme tiredness that makes it really hard for someone to care for a newborn or just simply handle daily tasks. Treatments often include counseling and medication. And in the case of Lindsay Clancy, she is labeled as having postpartum psychosis, which is a more severe, rare, and dangerous mental health emergency that affects about one to two in every thousand women after childbirth. It causes a total loss of touch with reality, extreme confusion, and rapid mood change. If you don't know about the Lindsay Clancy case, she is currently on trial in Massachusetts for unaliveing three of her children, ages five years, three years, and the youngest was eight months. It's a really sad case, and I've been a little obsessed with it myself, honestly. I keep getting feeds about it. Have either of you, ladies, Leah or Genevieve, been following the case at all? Genevieve: To be honest, I have not. I keep up with some court cases, but it's usually court cases in which federal courts have halted dangerous actions being taken by our current POTUS. And that's typically what my newsfeed consists of when it comes to court cases, but I'll look up this case, and I imagine, though, that there's a lot of stigma and misunderstanding surrounding postpartum depression. And cases like this, I'm guessing, and I don't know because I haven't watched a lot of the case, but they probably sensationalized the macabre and villainized the person at the center of the case who has postpartum to the detriment of others who experience it in a more everyday sort of way. I did see, however, a discussion about who is afforded grace in particular cases such as this, and whiteness with its resultant privilege likely plays a role here. Not that people should not be afforded grace. They absolutely should. Just that we should simultaneously consider the positionality of the person at the center of the case here and how that likely affects public perception. Myria: Yeah, well, from my understanding, from me following the case, but I could also just be getting reels because of my point of view, too, but it's almost kind of split a little bit because there are people who are, like you said, they're really chastising her, and there are people who are actually really supportive of her, truthfully. I think a lot, I mean, I bet a lot of women kind of understand what she's going through, you know, because like I said, a lot of people do get, have had some sort of, you know, level of severity with postpartum depression, I think. Leah: Yeah, I'm not familiar with the details of the case, though I've heard about it in broad strokes. It's obviously really tragic and horrible, which I think is why it's getting so much attention, but why this particular case when there are other similar cases, I'm not sure. I do think that this is a recurring pattern in our culture. A woman who is accused of and on trial for violence or murder, in this case, of her own children, it's sensational because of the cultural expectation for a woman's whole life to be about loving her children. It goes against everything that we believe about the nature of motherhood, and so I think that's part of why it sticks in our brain and our cultural consciousness when things like this happen. Genevieve: That's a good point, yeah. Myria: I mean, there's a lot of things going on in the case, and I'm not going to go into super big details, but to maybe answer what you had said a little bit, Leah, there's also like this twist to the story. It's like a murder mystery, too, because now there's evidence that like the husband might have actually, because she's on a bunch of medication, like I said, one of the treatments for postpartum is medication, and there's just, I guess, little details that people are starting to speculate maybe the husband was like involved in giving her too much medication, you know, too much of the medication she's prescribed or whatever, but that's, yeah, but I guess you have to follow the case. If you do want to follow the case, it is pretty easy to find because it is all over social media. All you have to do is just search her name. It's Lindsay Clancy, and yeah, it pops right up because everybody's really talking about it, and anyway. Leah: Interesting. Yeah. It's interesting what gets into both, like not just what I was just saying about expectations on moms, but also the stigmatization of mental illness in general. I mean, we know statistically mentally ill people are way more likely to be victims of violent crime than to commit violent crime, and yet that's not the way that we imagine it. That's not the way that our pop culture imagines it. Yeah. Interesting. Myria: It's a lot of things, yeah. Genevieve: So, do you want to keep going? Okay. I was going to say, Leah, our guest today, has a chapbook of poetry coming out from Chestnut Review in the second half of 2027 that she wrote during her postpartum in 2024. She is a poet, a writer, a creative writing instructor, and all-around excellent human. Welcome, Leah, to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience with PPD? Leah: Hi. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. That is a lovely introduction, and I'll add that I am mother to a healthy and beautiful two-year-old. Obviously, with postpartum in 2024, you can kind of do the math, but postpartum depression is sort of this catch-all term that we use for hormonal mood disorders that occur in that postpartum period, which can be defined as the first few weeks or months or even up to two years after pregnancy ends. I say after pregnancy ends because it is not always after you have a baby. Postpartum depression can also happen after miscarriage, after pregnancy is terminated. We associate it with new motherhood, but it's a hormonal thing, so it's not about the baby being here. It's about what's happening inside your body. There's this huge, very rapid dip in hormone levels in your body after pregnancy, and for about a third of women, that affects the brain. Almost everyone experiences some level of mood changes after pregnancy ends, but for that third, it's this intense, long-lasting, and very impairing experience. We call it depression, but it really is different from what you might have with chronic depression or bipolar depression. That's a catch-all word because it's culturally catchy. It makes sense to us as you're down, you're depressed, but postpartum people can experience anxiety, psychosis, like the defendant in that murder trial, even OCD, like an OCD-type anxiety that arises in that postpartum period, and that was my experience, or at least that's how my therapist diagnosed me as having PPD with an OCD-type. By OCD, I do mean obsessive-compulsive disorder. I'm very glad to be here and talking about it because I do feel like there aren't enough representations of it, especially in fiction. It's something that I've been ranting about to anyone who will listen to me, but not that my book is fiction. It's poetry, and they're personal poems. Myria: What was it that made you actually go to the doctor and seek help? What were you feeling that made you think, huh, this isn't normal, or did you know right away, I guess, what it was? Leah: That's a good question. I have a special case because I already had a therapist beforehand and before I gave birth, and I have experienced hormonal mood changes in other ways in the past, so I knew that I was high-risk for postpartum depression, postpartum scaries. I was prepared to talk about it and be screened for it, and they do have a screen for it at the doctor when you go for your postpartum health check. In my case, I had a C-section, so you go in and they're checking your incision and all of that, and then they just put this piece of paper in front of you and make you check how many times you've felt hopeless or how difficult it is to do certain things. I mean, it was very difficult for me to tell the truth on that screener, and that was, for me, like a red flag in my mind that I don't want to tell my doctor how bad I'm feeling, so I better tell a mental health professional. Also, I was crying all the time. When I was literally in the hospital having just given birth, I was crying. Every single time a nurse or doctor came in, I was crying, and I said to my doctor at one point, that's normal, though, and she said, not really. Myria: Wow. Wow. Genevieve: That's interesting. Myria: Do you feel like postpartum depression is something that people can control? How did you feel, I guess? Leah: Yeah. In some ways, I did control it on my own because I was able to identify that I needed support and seek out that support. That's because I was already educated on it beforehand, so I will say that I had that, and in a way, no one ever really does anything alone, so I had support from my therapist. My partner supported me, both in helping to take care of the baby as well as in recognizing ways that I was behaving and the thought patterns that I was falling into. One of the stereotypes of PPD is that it makes it hard or impossible to bond with your child or to take care of your child. I wasn't really experiencing difficulty bonding or even difficulty taking care of my baby so much. I mean, it's always hard, especially not having family support around, which I didn't. It was just me and my partner, and that's always hard because newborns need 24-7 attention. But I felt bonded with my baby instantly. I know that for some women, that's not the case, and I think that that is something that we should talk about more as being totally okay. Some parents don't feel bonded to their children until after the one-year mark, and they're starting to get to know this new person. I felt connected with my baby. I just didn't feel connected to the rest of the world. My identity was changing so much, especially as this was my first child. I'm becoming a mother, which there's a word for that. It's matrescence. It literally changes your standing in society. It places this new word on you, this whole different level of expectation, and I did not feel like the expectations I was failing to meet were coming from my baby. I felt like they were coming from the world. I was constantly afraid that someone was going to come take him away. We can talk more about that, but that's a little bit of an intersection with trauma, having been in a household that was affected by CPS as a child. But yeah, just all of these new double binds. I mean, we have double binds as women, but we have even more as mothers, and that was really hard to square with. So in some ways, I know that new motherhood and new parenthood in general can definitely be a trigger for mental illness and for mental unwell events, but PPD was sort of aside from all that, even. It was very chemically driven. Genevieve: That's really interesting. Thank you for sharing that bit about the difference that society is imposing that on you, and the expectations of motherhood, and I think that's really important that we get that out to the public and talk about that more. Leah: I was feeling like I was a bad mom and a bad person, and everybody could tell, and it took me a long time to realize that no one can read my thoughts and that I can't read other people's thoughts, and I don't know if these other moms that I'm looking up to are also feeling like they want to run away or scream or what have you. So every time I would have a thought like that, like, I just got to get out of here, I'm so tired, I can't take this, I would be like, how dare you think that? And I would go in and just try to cut those thoughts out of my brain, and that's what happens in OCD. And it's totally normal. It's totally normal for a new parent with a new needy baby to be like, I need a drink so bad. Genevieve: It absolutely is. Myria: What did you do or what do you do to cope with those, I guess, anxious feelings? Leah: So for me, diagnosis was a big part of it. Learning that I had known about postpartum depression, but I was not clear on the OCD type or what that looked like or felt like. So being diagnosed with that. And then my therapist gave me tools for interrupting those thought spirals or for reminding myself to kind of ground and try to let go of them. At this point, at the point of diagnosis, some people do go on medication, the same kinds of medication that you would take not in the postpartum period, or some people do go on hormone supplementation. So they'll get doses of estrogen to lift the mood that can be titrated off of. I did neither of those things. I did just kind of deal and do talk therapy. Myria: Wonderful. Yes. Wow. That exactly answered my question. So thank you. Genevieve: Yeah. So you mentioned before the podcast that in addition to PPD, you also had dysmorphic milk ejection reflex, or is it D-MER? Leah: I've heard D-MER and D-M-E-R. Yeah. Either one. We can say D-MER. Genevieve: Okay. A mood disorder related to breastfeeding. Would you like to share what this is and what your experience with it was like? What would you want others to understand about this disorder? Leah: Yes. Thank you so much for asking. DEMER was excruciating. Dysphoric milk ejection reflex. It is a physical condition. As far as I understand it, it is vastly understudied, and I had never heard of it, never even in passing before I had it. Basically, it is a sharp and horrendous, terrible drop in mood that happens when the breast milk starts flowing. A little background on that is that whenever you're lactating, your milk's not just flowing all the time. It's triggered to flow either by proximity to your hungry baby or sometimes by them crying, or in my case, because I had it coupled with a low milk supply, so I needed to pump as well. It's just this sudden awfulness that was so unfamiliar and scary to me. Just the moment that the milk would start flowing, I would cry. I would scream. I would lose my temper. I would be full of this horrible rage, and sometimes I would have the urge to self-harm. I would have a really strong urge to self-harm, but I would be connected to the pump, and then by the time I was done pumping, it would go away, and I would feel sort of okay, but not knowing what it was was terrifying. That would always leave me shaken, and then I got into a cycle with that postpartum OCD too, so I'm like, why did I want to do that? I must really be miserable. I would maybe spend all day obsessing about it, obsessing about I'm going crazy, so it was a really vicious cycle, but yeah, the D-MER. Nobody had ever talked to me about that. When I went to talk to a lactation specialist at a community health center, the woman who mentioned D-MER to me was telling me about it, and then she was like, oh, but you don't have that. You'd know if you had that, and I definitely did have it. Genevieve: Yeah. Myria: That's interesting. Yeah. I've never heard of it either. I've never heard of anybody talking about it either. Do you think, and I apologize if you had answered this question, but is the D-MER and postpartum depression, are they linked? One is more susceptible to having D-MER if they have postpartum, or can you have the D-MER without the postpartum? Does that make sense what I'm trying to ask? Leah: I think that they probably do. They probably do have comorbidity, but I really don't know. I'm not a doctor, obviously, but also they're really not very, at least definitely D-MER, is really not very known. It's not been studied nearly enough. We have this cultural expectation, because most women experience breastfeeding as a time of tenderness and bonding, that most women, when the milk lets down, get a wave of euphoria. To experience the exact opposite, yeah, it was really scary. It definitely, it went hand in hand for me with having a low milk supply, which I felt deeply ashamed of. In retrospect, I don't. I look back on that, and I'm like, it's totally okay. My baby had formula and was happy and healthy, and that was okay. Even though it was giving me this terrible mood problem, I insisted on giving my child all the breast milk that I could give for six months. If I had it to do over again, or if I could reach back in time, I would be very gentle with myself and say, two weeks is plenty. It's not worth all this. Myria: It's an interesting story. Genevieve: It is. Leah, thank you so much for sharing all of that deeply personal experience. I'm really happy that you worked on this poetry collection during your PPD, and that you have it coming out soon. That's super exciting. Do you want to tell us more about what inspired the collection, and what you hope to see it do out in the world? Leah: Yes, thank you so much. I would love to talk about it. I'm very hippy-dippy about poetry. I don't want to go off pretentious, but I really mean everything I say. I feel like writing was part of how I recovered. I am of a mind that I think that poetry comes through me, instead of coming from me. Being able to open myself back up to that, and poetry is a spiritual practice for me. Opening myself back up to that, connecting with that part of myself, again, it was instrumental in making me feel better. Maybe that would have been my timeline anyway. Maybe I would have been recovering around the time that I was writing this anyway. Who knows? It really did feel like it helped me to have that creative outlet. Shout out to my friend, Alina Nguyen, who led a poetry workshop that helped me come back to writing. She was having us write about the things that we're actually seeing, was encouraging us to write not about things that are out there, but things that are right in front of us. She offered us examples that were poetry about the laundromat or poetry about the driveway. I realized that something that I had been looking at a lot was the Merlin app, which is a birding app where you keep track of the birds that you're seeing. Genevieve: I have that app. I love it. Leah: Yes! It's a great app. It has that bird of the day feature, where every day you get another bird that's theoretically in your area. Even though I was really not getting out much, I was looking at that bird of the day every day to see if it was a bird that I could see out my window, basically. I started writing a poem every day about the bird of the day. Whatever the bird was, I would write a poem about that bird. Into that space, I was able to pour a lot of the experiences that I was having with being a new mom, with just existing in that space of the 2024 election cycle, and with my mood disorders, and with being isolated. Out of it came this little collection that, that following spring, I shaped into 20 poems. I think there's 20, around that number, and then started putting it out into the world. Chestnut Review is taking a chance on it, and it will be out in the world October 2027. Genevieve: Yay! Myria: That's fantastic. I'm going to have to read it. Genevieve: Yeah, me too. Myria: Are you going to be doing a book opening or anything, too, for it? I mean, I assume you would. Leah: Yeah, I hope so. That's obviously not planned yet, but I do hope to get something on the books, yeah. Myria: Perfect. I'm sure Genevieve will hear about it, and then I'll like to hear about it, too. Genevieve: Yeah. Myria: My next question really isn't a question, it's kind of a statement. I know most of our, actually our whole entire conversation has been about postpartum depression in women. I remember hearing a long time ago that, I don't even remember who told me, but I heard that men can actually get postpartum depression, too. Of course, I had to look it up. And, apparently, men can have postpartum depression, so we don't want to, I mean, I don't want to, like, disclude the men in this situation, but it's called paternal postnatal depression. Have you guys heard about it at all? Leah: I have. Myria: You have? Leah: Yeah. Do you know anything about it? I do, and I'm aware that there's been, I don't necessarily know if this is from a peer-reviewed study or if this is just a colloquial knowledge about it, that among new fathers, testosterone does drop. That happens when you're exposed to a newborn as a man. And, obviously, trans men can get postpartum depression just like anyone assigned female at birth, anyone with a uterus who experiences pregnancy. So, we're talking about cis men. I think that I can't speak on it because I've never had that experience, but it's easy for me to imagine that the kind of depression or anxiety or what have you that's occurring in these new fathers is actually not hormone dependent, even though it might be true that hormones drop. I mean, I imagine that with the lifestyle changes, huge lifestyle changes can trigger depression and anxiety in anyone, whether it's getting a new baby or it's losing your job or even getting a new job, right? So, I don't know. I've never experienced it, but I do wonder if it feels different because I know that in my life, the moments that I've gone through rough mental health and have postpartum depression felt very different. Myria: What you said, honestly, was kind of what I collected from the little bit of research I did do on postpartum depression for men, sorry, paternal postnatal depression. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you for that response. Leah: Yeah, anything that gets them studying that postpartum period more is good, but studying it in women first, I wouldn't mind. Genevieve: Right, yeah. Especially the societal expectation that you were talking about in the double bind. So, is there anything else you would like to share, Leah? What else have we not covered in our conversation so far today? Leah: I think that we've covered a lot in this conversation. Obviously, there's always more to say about life and parenting and also about postpartum depression. I do think that what I hope people take away is that postpartum mood disorders exist in a lot of forms, and those most sensational ones that you see where children or parents are harmed, are physically harmed, or even have their lives taken by it, that is such a minority of what happens. And that does not mean that the cases where it doesn't escalate to physical violence are not doing harm. I think that a lot of people suffer in silence with this, and that if we talked about it more, the more that we talk about it, the more awareness there is and the more people are able to get help and get past that stigma. Genevieve: That's wonderful. Yeah. Thank you, Leah. Myria: Oh, we definitely had an amazing conversation today, especially everything you had said and shared, Leah. Thank you so much again for speaking to us today, and it's a pleasure meeting you. Good luck in your writing and all your future endeavors. Good luck in motherhood. I, too, have one child. He's a little bit older now, but I didn't experience the postpartum, and I didn't experience the D-MER at all. Thank goodness. So I hope everything goes well with you and all that. That sounds scary, you know? Just like you, I only have the one child, so if that had happened to me, I would have not known what to do at all. I would have thought, like, what's going on with me? But I'm definitely grateful for being a mom. It's like the most wonderful experience of my life. Leah: Oh, yeah, me too. I will say that as well. I think that it is important when we talk about postpartum depression to also talk about, like, it does not make me any less in love with my life, with my child. I am very, very happy to be a mom, and, you know, my kid's perfect. Genevieve: That's wonderful. Myria: But anyway, my heart goes out to Lindsay Clancy and her children, her family, everyone affected by the tragedy. I really do hope the outcome of her case brings justice and peace to everyone. I guess my last word today, because I do feel like this conversation was really important to me. And I'm not really, because I didn't experience postpartum, I'm not really sure why I felt like it affected me so much. But I really did want to talk about it. I think maybe my heart just goes out to people who are dealing with it, you know? I'm not sure why. So all I can say is just... Genevieve: Because you're an empathetic human being. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, just take care of yourself, take care of each other. That's all I can say to everybody. Genevieve: Yeah. And Leah, thank you so much for joining us. Leah: Yeah, thank you for having me. Genevieve: It was wonderful to have you on. And thank you to our listeners who keep us going. You can find our podcast on Amazon, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. You can also follow our Substack at www.substack.com slash at symbol, that's the little A with the circle around it, see me the podcast.