I wasn't diagnosed with BP until this year, but I remember my pregnancies very well. The first three, I was b**chy, the last two merely weepy, and that was more alarming (to me, anyway) because I'm not a crier. It was what happened postpartum that, in retrospect, should've scared the hell out of everyone.

I mean, I was not only overemotional, I was basically psychotic, and after the fifth one I knew I should never have another child. With him, I actually had suicide/infanticide ideation, which was strange, because he was so precious to me since I'd nearly lost him just prior to birth. I had these grisly fantasies about lying down on the train tracks, or stepping out in front of a speeding car with him in my arms, because he was too wonderful to have to go through the kind of pain and suffering everyone else did, and because I was unworthy of having such a gift.

Now, we didn't talk of such things back then.....surely some women had these difficulties, but we were so ashamed of these awful feelings that we didn't even speak of them to each other. It wasn't until the Andrea Yates case some years later that postpartum psychosis came to public attention; what I couldn't figure out was why she didn't commit suicide after drowning her kids, because I sure would have, but in a way I understood how these things come to pass.

Fortunately, I never acted on the fantasies, but I was so deeply ashamed of those feelings that I seldom share them, even though I know now that I wasn't in full control of my faculties. How I wish I'd known then that there were medications and therapies for this! So much guilt and pain.....it still haunts me, even 21 years later.

I tell this story only because I know so much more now, having studied the effects of pregnancy on mental illness (and vice-versa). While I've never regretted having all five of my kids, if I'd known then what I know today I would have stopped after the first two, because my PP depression was worse with each successive birth until it became frank psychosis with that fifth child. Lord only knows what might've happened if I'd had a sixth. Which is a consideration every woman with mental illness, or even a history of "baby blues", must weigh when thinking about having more children. JMHO.