Hear Me Out:

My story is proof that Andrea Yates’

children didn’t have to die.

 

GLAMOUR FEBRUARY 2002

 

The first time I heard about Andrea Yates, the 37-year-old Texas mother who drowned her five young children I was heartbroken – five lives lost. It was simply [an unspeakable] tragedy. But when I learned the pros­ecutor was seeking the death penalty for murder, charging that Yates had con­sciously planned to kill her children, I became completely outraged.

 

Why? Because for two and a half years, I suffered from postpartum psychosis (PPP) and postpartum depression (PPD)—the same two mood disorders doctors say plagued Yates. And based on my experi­ence, I’m certain she had no control over what she was doing. During my bout with PPP, a condition characterized by acute anxiety, paranoia and hallucinations, I often behaved irrationally. I was commit­ted to psychiatric wards on eight separate occasions, and I even tried to commit sui­cide. I’m thankful to be alive—and grateful that I never hurt my child. Tragically, Yates and her children weren’t so fortunate. But I believe that her plea of not guilty by reason of insanity is absolutely justified.

 

Both PPP and PPD are brought on by a combination of factors that women experi­ence following childbirth, including severe drops in estrogen and progesterone, the psychological impact of the delivery and the stress and exhaustion of new mother­hood. Nobody knows for sure why some feel inadequacy, guilt, anxiety and fatigue. Related research shows that the more extreme PPP afflicts about one out of 1,000 and if ignored or untreated can lead to suicide or infanticide. The Yates case thrust PPD and PPP into the national spotlight, but many peo­ple don’t know that both illnesses are 100 percent treatable. My story is proof that Yates’ children didn’t have to die.

 

“I was convinced they were trying to kill me”

I married my husband, an aircraft mechanic, in 1988, and we decided to wait about five years before starting a family so that I could focus on my career in health care marketing. We spent these early years traveling to vacation spots near our home in Florida, going out to dinner and spending time on our boat. When I got pregnant in 1994, we were so excited, we told everyone. But I miscarried after eight weeks, and we were both devastated. A few months later, I got pregnant again, and our son, whose name we’d like to keep private, was born in November 1995.

 

It was a difficult delivery—the pain was so intense, I thought I was going to die. After 24 hours of labor, my doctor performed an episiotomy to facilitate the birthing process. The agony disappeared as soon as I held my beautiful, wide-eyed boy. We felt blessed.

 

I spent just one night in the hospital, but after I returned home, it became clear I could have used more supervised recovery time. Not only was it impossible for me to sit comfortably due to the episiotomy stitches, it also took three days for my milk to come in. By then my breasts had swelled from an A cup to a D cup and felt like they were on fire. The pain and exhaustion, on top of the hormonal changes taking place in my body, led to the “baby blues,” a mild form of PPD that studies show affects 50 to 80 percent of all new mothers. My husband was so support­ive – he prepared warm compresses for my breasts, ran errands and helped me feed our baby – and he never complained.

 

My mother’s arrival a week later was a blessing. She took care of the household

and allowed me to focus on my son (who –  by January had begun sleeping through – the night). But while my milk supply eventually adjusted to my baby’s feeding schedule, I didn’t. I kept waking up to make sure he was OK, and those restless nights were fertile ground for the onset of my anxiety. I was never able to fall back asleep and would lie awake worrying about how I would cope without my mother, who had done so much to help. I was also planning to go back to work, which further panicked me:  Who could I trust to take care of my child?

 

When my mother left in late January, I came undone. I soon became convinced that something bad was going to happen to my son. During this paranoid period, I wrote a goodbye note in my son’s baby journal, which ended, “Just remember that Mommy loves you and that God loves you.” It was as if I believed I wasn’t going to be around much longer.

 

My behavior began to worry my hus­band. He tried to talk to me, but I was irra­tional to the point that I didn’t trust him. One evening, following three sleepless nights, I wouldn’t even let him near our son. When he phoned my doctor for advice, I tried to knock the phone out of his hand. My doctor then called 911, and when the police arrived with paramedics, I was recit­ing scripture over and over again, holding our son so tightly that I could have suffo­cated him. I’m 58 and 125 pounds, but it took three paramedics and two policemen to pry my son from my arms. The para­medics then tied me to a gurney and tranquilized me. The whole time, I was con­vinced they were trying to kill me.

 

I woke up under 24-hour suicide watch in a psychiatric ward, where a doctor diag­nosed me with PPD, put me on Haldol—an antipsychotic drug—and sent me home. My diagnosis was later changed to PPP, but nobody told me what caused it. I didn’t understand why I was sick or that other women suffered from the same disease. This ignorance, I would later learn, may have only perpetuated my illness.

 

“I flat-lined, but the doctors revived me”

 

In February 1996, I had my first auditory and visual hallucination. We were visiting my sister’s church, and the priest was say­ing mass, but I envisioned that he was preparing to perform a ceremonial human sacrifice. My fears reached a frenzy toward the end of the service, and I held my son up in the air; shouting, “He’s the son of God!” thinking my words would pro­tect him from being sacrificed. The congre­gation watched me, silent and stunned. My sister and my husband tried to calm me, but I wouldn’t let them near me or my son. At the end of the service, they fled out of the church with the others. When my sis­ter returned a little while later, she con­vinced me it was safe to leave.

 

For the next 15 months, I lived in a fog. My husband made sure I took my medica­tion, but caring for my child still over­whelmed and exhausted me. Within weeks, however, the paranoia and halluci­nations stopped, and I decided to return to full-time employment. But the stress of work pushed me to the brink. I began hav­ing even more trouble sleeping and sank into a deep depression. One day, after I dropped off my year-old son at day care, I rushed home in a state of panic. I remem­ber thinking, This has got to stop, and so I swallowed an entire bottle of Pamelor, an antidepressant prescribed to me a few months earlier. My husband called home, and I told him what I had done, just before I blacked out. At the hospital, I flat-lined, but the doctors revived me, saving my life.

 

“I realized I was not alone”

During the weeks following my suicide attempt, I started seeing a psychiatrist, who finally put me on the road to recovery. While the other specialists who treated me had focused on prescribing the right med­ications, this woman listened to me, which made all the difference in the world. As a mother herself, she seemed to understand my struggles and didn’t make me feel as if there was something wrong with me. Over the next few months, through intensive therapy, I was weaned off all medication. Equally important, I began to learn more about my condition. When I read that one in every 1,000 new moms suffers from PPP, it gave me a new perspective. For the first time, I realized I was not alone.

 

At one point, I read an article in which Ilyene Barsky, founder and director of the Center for Postpartum Adjustment in Coral Springs, Florida, listed the risk fac­tors for PPD and PPP—they include hav­ing had a miscarriage, having gone through a difficult labor and having left a career to care for your child. I went through all of these, and yet nobody warned me about the possibility of PPD and PPP. Granted, there is conflicting research that raises questions about what the risk factors are, but had I known I was even potentially susceptible, I would have found a therapist who had experience with postpartum illness. As it turned out, by the time I was diagnosed with PPP, I was already too far gone to understand what was happening to me.

 

Once I realized that very few people know the devastating impact of these dis­orders, I decided to become an activist. In February 2000, I joined Postpartum Sup­port International, a nonprofit organiza­tion that provides PPP and PPD sufferers with emotional support and information. PSI believes that knowledgeable medical and psychological care are crucial but that social support is the key to long-lasting success. It sounds so simple, but it’s true:

 

An informed, compassionate listener can help victims regain control of their lives.

I’m now a Florida-area coordinator for PSI, and my work has come full circle: The women I first comforted when I started here are now reaching out to help other women struggling with postpartum men­tal illness. One woman I helped wrote me a letter that read, “I felt like I was going crazy, and you came in to light up my dark­ness and showed me the right way.” Notes like this make me think, If only Andrea Yates had found someone to listen to her— someone informed about this iliness who could soothe her psyche—maybe things would have turned out differently.

 

I say this because during my illness, I convinced myself that I’d never feel better; that there was no way out. Yates must have felt the same way—she tried unsuc­cessfully to kill herself at least twice before turning to her children, and I can only imagine that on that tragic morning, she saw them as an extension of herself.

 

The question now is: How should Andrea Yates pay for her crime? In my opinion, a mother who kills her children during a psychotic break and then “wakes up” to realize what she has done will spend the rest of her life agonizing over her actions. Regardless of what happens in court, this is Andrea Yates’ life sentence. She has already suffered enough. She now belongs in a psychiatric ward, not a prison.

 

I worry that Yates’ fate will affect many other women, too: If she is sentenced to death, PPD and PPP will be further demon­ized, making it even harder for women suffering from these illnesses to come for­ward and ask for help. We may never be able to forgive Yates, and we’ll certainly never forget her crimes, but now is the time to show her some compassion.

For more information about Post­partum Support International, visit postpartum.net or call 805-967-7636. ®

 

What do you think? Should Andrea Yates face the death penalty? Should she be imprisoned? Does she belong in a psychiatric ward? Write and tell us at postpartum@glamour.com. Please include a daytime phone number.

 

GLAMOUR FEBRUARY 2002