By Nine To Noon’s Kathryn Ryan for RNZ An Australian health professional shares her experience with postpartum psychosis and her tips for new mothers battling the mental illness. Ariane Beeston was walking her son in his buggy when she looked down and it wasn’t a baby she saw. “I was walking home from work, pushing the pram, and Henry had turned into a dragon.
I was hallucinating . At that time it was actually more a return of those psychotic symptoms I had experienced those hallucinations when he was much younger,” she tells Nine to Noon’s Kathryn Ryan. “I had returned to work, I had convinced my psychiatrist that going back to work would be good for my recovery that it would help me to feel more competent and help me to feel myself again .
.. it was a real relapse, a real wake-up call that I wasn’t actually recovered, I wasn’t well.
“I had this real strange sensation of my hands and my fingers not belonging to me, just a very, very distressing almost disembodied.” Beeston was in her 20s, working as a psychologist with the NSW department of communities and justice when she took a break to have her first child. “[It was] very, very stressful, intense work .
.. it sort of lay some of the foundations what then transpired for me postpartum in terms of my psychotic illness .
.. there were elements of particular cases I had worked on that featured later on.
” Beeston has written a book about her experience of postpartum psychosis, Because I’m Not Myself, You .