Given that all of this was happening in my room on a psychiatric ward, I was a little late to the realisation party. There had been other not-so-subtle hints – in my belief that my baby had been swapped at birth, for instance, and that road signs were tailored messages for me. I held these truths to be self-evident and never considered them to be odd, let alone symptoms of an illness. Yet that’s precisely what they were – evidence of a sick and struggling brain. Just as a diseased heart struggles to keep time, or a broken leg struggles to bear weight, my poorly brain was struggling to maintain my personality and kept coughing up delusions and hallucinations.

I have a story to tell you, but I’m afraid I’m a less than perfect narrator because there are crevasses in my mind that I fall through whenever I try to tell it. Let’s begin with a memory that is on solid ground: I can pin my finger firmly on the moment I began to wonder if something was really quite wrong. From behind me I heard a child’s voice, small but determined, counting, “One, two, three… one, two, three…” in a Glaswegian accent. I contorted this way and that in search of its pestering, persistent owner, but I was alone. This was new. Later that evening I watched a psychedelic display of electric lions, roaring tigers and the cast of the film Jumanji cavort on the bare blue wall. I wasn’t afraid, just captivated. Yet a voice, this time my own, questioned how I could be seeing such a spectacle and suggested, gently, that perhaps those around me were right – things were very wrong.

One in five mothers suffers from depression, anxiety or psychosis during pregnancy or the first year after giving birth, according to a report last year by the Independent Mental Health Taskforce for NHS England. Yet in England, fewer than 15 per cent of local clinical commissioning groups provide effective specialist community perinatal services for women with severe or complex conditions. Over 40 per cent provide no service at all. This is despite the fact that in the UK, suicide is the leading cause of maternal deaths in the first 12 months after the end of pregnancy.

It seems so obvious now but thanks to the disease I lacked what’s called “insight” in psychiatric parlance – awareness of how ill I was. I have insight now. I know how serious an illness I had and how lucky I was to eventually get the specialist medical help I needed.

I can identify with those women. I feel the fear of stigma keenly as I write this, afraid of how you’ll judge me as a mother and as a person. And for months, I too thought my symptoms were a normal part of motherhood and would resolve. This was made easier to believe because the symptoms of postpartum psychosis can wax and wane, so sometimes I didn’t feel so bad. Yet at the peak of my disease a nurse told me I was one of the sickest women she’d seen enter the ward. This shocked me. Sure, I was a bit anxious, a bit bothered, but surely not seriously ill. I had put so much of it down to sleep deprivation, to the shock of becoming a new mother, to the stress of losing blood and developing an infection after the Caesarean section. Being a parent is meant to be hard, isn’t it? Yes, but it shouldn’t involve thinking trees are angry with you.

Unfortunately, infanticide grabs headlines and so women who suffer postpartum psychosis often worry about the stigma of revealing they’ve had the disease, a stigma that also affects mothers with other maternal mental health problems, such as postpartum depression. Many don’t seek help. One Australian study found that of those women who had symptoms of postpartum depression, 41 per cent had not sought help by nine months after the birth. As well as stigma and embarrassment, many said they believed their symptoms were normal and would go away on their own.

I was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, a severe mental illness that affects about one or two in every 1,000 women soon after childbirth. It can cause a litany of symptoms, from anxiety and profound sadness to chattiness, hyperactivity and euphoria. Women with postpartum psychosis can rapidly cycle between moods and may experience hallucinations and delusions. While it’s more common in women who have bipolar disorder, it can affect women who’ve never had any mental health issues before. It’s a psychiatric emergency that requires urgent treatment because the symptoms can start suddenly and get worse quickly. At its most severe it poses a risk of suicide. It can even lead to accidental harm to the baby or infanticide, though this is exceedingly rare.

© Moonassi

Many people who tell their stories of severe mental illness do so from a safe distance of years. My story is only months old, and the bits I remember, I see in full technicolour. It was my first pregnancy and it had gone pretty well, apart from some joint pain in my pelvis and the stress of commuting from St Albans to work as a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Some days it seemed as if the act of wearing my “Baby on board” badge rendered my fellow travellers temporarily blind and deaf to my bulging bump and seat request. I was done with commuting and also ready to be done with my NHS-mandated, irritatingly cheese- and wine-depleted diet. The end was in sight but in the first piece of evidence that my baby was destined to be a contrary madam, she was breech – essentially meaning she was the wrong way up in my womb – and therefore a plan was made for me to have an elective Caesarean section. In further verification of her wayward nature, she demanded to enter the world before the elective date. So my 8 lb 7 oz of pink, screamy gorgeousness, also known as Beatrix, was born by emergency Caesarean section in January 2016.

Now, as I reflect on the gap between my expectations of bringing her into the world and the reality of it, I see a dark, vast cavern. I had expected to be the first person to hold her. I’d imagined a celebratory moment as the three of us were together as a family for the first time. In fact, due to the cocktail of drugs I had been given I spent most of my C-section trying to throw up. My husband was therefore the first to hold her, and clutched her in one arm and a sick bowl for me in the other. I also bled quite a lot, losing about a third of my blood volume. When the operation was over I began to shake violently, so I still couldn’t hold her. We returned to the maternity ward, where a nurse tried to get breastfeeding to work for us, but I was still shaking too much. Ever resourceful, she hand-milked me and collected the milk in a syringe to give to Beatrix. And that’s not the least dignified experience I’ve had since joining the ranks of motherhood.

In those first few days I began to develop beliefs that I can now see as the first daggers of disease stabbing my mind. I thought all the nurses were talking about me, and had an ever-growing suspicion that my baby had been swapped. “She looks just like your husband,” the nurses said, and each time they did I was more convinced that she had been swapped and that they were part of a conspiracy trying to fool me. Over time, once back home with my baby, I felt increasingly anxious and had a burgeoning concern that ninja social workers were watching me and plotting to take my baby. I had to prove to the world that I was a model mum so the spying social workers wouldn’t see any signs of weakness. I therefore hid my suspicious thoughts and fears from everyone. Even my husband, who has been my best friend and confidant for over 13 years, wasn’t aware of just how ill I had become. However, he knew from my behaviour that something was wrong and so at his behest six weeks after the birth I went to see a GP. Unhelpfully, she said that it was a “red flag” against my care for Beatrix that I had said I didn’t want a particular health visitor coming round. The phrase set me off and I exited sharply from the meeting, convinced she was part of the baby-thieving conspiracy. Without the help I needed, over the following weeks my mind shattered into a thousand jagged pieces. I became manic.

Five months after my baby was born things had reached the point where I was terrified of leaving the house for fear of murderous social workers. I had a new health visitor, who had picked up that something was amiss and had begun visiting every two weeks. When she came round one day to find me speaking rapidly and unable to stop pacing, she put the wheels in motion to get me help urgently.

My mind was like a fantastical game of pinball, the steel balls of my thoughts zig-zagging at a million miles an hour around my energised grey matter

And so it came to be that on an otherwise ordinary Sunday afternoon in June, I was admitted voluntarily to the mother and baby psychiatric unit (MBU) at St John’s Hospital, Livingston (we had left London for Edinburgh to be closer to family). I thought it seemed like overkill, but my mum and husband persuaded me it was a good idea. It didn’t seem like such a good idea once I arrived. As we approached the MBU I heard a baby scream and I instantly ran down the bare brick-walled corridor in the opposite direction, convinced the unit existed to collect up bad mothers and swap their babies for robots. My husband and a psychiatric nurse had to physically shepherd me on to the ward, coaxing me with promises that my baby girl and I could leave again soon. That was an optimistic assessment.

My mind was like a fantastical game of pinball, the steel balls of my thoughts zig-zagging at a million miles an hour around my energised grey matter: “Red car. Gryffindor. Harry Potter. Harry Styles. Ooh, hair!” Each thought lit up like Vegas but burned out quickly, serving only as a springboard to the next – an experience that psychiatrists call a “flight of ideas”. It was exhilarating to think so quickly, faster than I had ever thought before, but there were too many thoughts for one mind to think. I tried explaining this, using an octopus-based analogy, to a psychiatric nurse, who said in a kind voice, the sort you might use when speaking to a small child or a golden retriever, that she didn’t follow. I didn’t expect her to follow. She was like a Peugeot 106 to my Formula 1 car, a three-legged donkey to my thoroughbred, the Circle Line to my bullet train – how could she possibly keep up with me? I didn’t need to slow down, I needed to speed up! And speed up I did, racing and pacing and chasing thoughts around the room. I paused only occasionally to line my belongings up in rows, in a vain attempt to create some order in my spiralling world of ever-increasing entropy.

© Moonassi

It was a week before I could leave the room, my paranoid mind conjuring up a million ways harm would befall me in the wide-open savannah of the ward. I pictured the nurses’ station as being staffed by red-eyed hyenas and jackals, all waiting to shred me limb from limb. This was to change as the antipsychotic medication helped to heal my beleaguered brain, and over the weeks of my admission I came to see the MBU as a place of safety. It offered baby massage sessions, weaning classes and splash play activities, all of which enabled me to be the mother I wanted to be. As it was a six-bed unit, there was also the opportunity to meet other mothers who were going through the same thing and discuss the impacts of our various treatments as well as the trials and tribulations of motherhood. In short, it was a place that helped me to re-grow the confidence that my disease had decimated, making me feel positive about our ability to thrive together at home.

I will forever be indebted to the dedicated, exceptionally talented professionals at St John’s MBU. The nurses, the doctors, the nursery nurses, the cleaners, the psychologist – they were united in their effort to care for me and they formed a net that caught me when I was falling fast. Some went above and beyond the remit of their jobs and became valued friends. It’s not an exaggeration to say their care saved my life. More than a year on since Beatrix’s birth, I still know I can lift the phone and get help from them.