Birth and my experience with Postpartum Psychosis
30 Oct 2026 Tags:personal The Maternity
Giving Birth
The story I am about to tell is one of pain and sickness, but also one about the strength of knowing when to trust your gut and when to ask for help. Above all, it’s a story of a huge amount of love between me, my husband, my baby, and all our loved ones who supported us immensely.
The pain starts (without much surprise) with labor. I started having contractions at 5 am. Around 9 am, we left for the maternity ward as the contractions were regular enough. They weren’t super painful, but you couldn’t ignore them, and you’d better breathe through them to manage it.
I wasn’t dilated enough, so we were recommended (by the student nurse who followed our case) to walk around the hospital and up and down the stairs. (Thanks a lot to Eloi <3 who accompanied me through this.) We did so, and I was a bit better, but still not 3 cm dilated, so we walked another two hours up and down the stairs—no change. Perhaps I managed my pain too well, because the nurse didn’t realize that, at roughly 4 pm (seven hours after arriving), the contractions were becoming very painful.
Anyway, after the baby monitoring, I tried getting up and had a contraction so bad that I started to scream uncontrollably. The nurse (not the student who had followed us so far) rushed in, saw the situation, and made the call to administer the epidural right away.
From there, it was smooth sailing: no pain, but I was still able to move my legs. I will forever remember the feeling of my baby starting to move through my hips, gently and without any pain—it was magical. The active part of pushing was also magical. I was very well guided by the midwife and very active, as I could still feel everything, just without pain. The baby I gave birth to was on the larger side at 4.08 kg, but that was kind of expected for a post-term baby!
Overall, I’d rate the experience of “giving birth” as 8/10.
Postpartum Follow-Up at the Hospital
On the first night after the delivery, my partner and I were exhausted from the previous night (the delivery itself) and crushed by the heat that had built up during the heatwave that had just ended (probably over 30°C in the room). Our baby was crying, and when we were at the end of our rope, feeling like we had tried everything, we asked for help. An auxiliary nurse (auxiliaire puéricultrice) arrived and offered to take him to the nursery; we accepted gratefully. Unfortunately, she came back with a second nurse who told us that our baby was crying because I had no milk, and that he would keep crying until he had been fed. We agreed to let him have a bottle, despite our wish to breastfeed.
She refused to take the baby to the nursery because, according to her, “whether he cries with you or with us, it’s the same.” This sentence shocked us deeply.
My husband handled this exchange while I fell into a comatose sleep after putting on a completely soaked t-shirt. The next morning, my partner and I realized that our state of exhaustion was such that neither of us could remember the faces of the auxiliary nurses — or even whether they were men or women. My husband and I were deeply traumatized by this first night. I developed postpartum psychosis (over three months of hospitalization), and my husband developed postpartum depression.
On the second day, following that first night, the baby would no longer take the breast without a trick involving a little formula milk. On our third day at the maternity ward, a nurse took away the syringe we needed for this trick and told us to put the baby to the breast even if he fell asleep on it (a tiring morning with the pediatrician’s visit and his first bath). She then suggested stimulating him progressively more aggressively, all the way up to placing cold wet compresses on him to wake him up. The baby screamed, then fell back asleep on the breast. All of this lasted an hour and a half during which the baby could have been sleeping, and it only ended when a silicone nipple shield was added.
During our postpartum stay at the maternity ward, we met wonderful people who truly took care of us, but also people who clearly had little regard for our physical and mental health. Overall, I’d rate the experience 3/10.
The Lessons I Learned
Through hardship, you always learn:
- Be very mindful as to whether your maternity ward has air conditioning if you are giving birth anywhere near summer.
- When things go south, it helps a ton to be prepared, so don’t hesitate to do your research in advance.
- Trust yourself and remember that you can refuse (or lie) to do something to your baby if you know it’s bad for them.
- Be very clear about your level of pain, and don’t hesitate to ask for the epidural before 3 cm dilation if you feel you need it. They may not give it to you, but they may—and it can help a ton.
- Ask many questions, especially those that scare you and where you feel you may already know the answer—you might be very wrong.
- Don’t hesitate to gently challenge the medical staff if something they are saying sounds incoherent.
- If the room is too warm and the baby is crying uncontrollably, consider wrapping them in a damp towel to refresh them.
Congratulations on being a mother, by the way, you are bipolar now (and always have been)
After the first night at the maternity ward that I described, I woke up full of energy after sleeping only 3 hours, following roughly 36 hours without sleep and giving birth. I believe that it was the stress of that first night that sent me down the drain.
From there, I was full of energy and living on 3 hours of sleep per night. That was not healthy, but my husband, who was also traumatized, had fallen into intense exhaustion, and I wanted to take advantage of my energy to take care of him.
In retrospect, my early signs were:
- Very little sleep; unable to take naps.
- Speaking (and thinking) unusually fast, unable to stop talking long enough to eat at a reasonable pace—very euphoric.
A week after coming home from the maternity ward, I stopped sleeping altogether and fell into postpartum psychosis (“psychose puerpérale”), best described here: https://www.maman-blues.fr/psychose-puerperale/
It’s a rare complication (less than 0.2% chance): you become psychotic, and the lives of both the mother and the baby are at risk. In my case, it took the form of a manic episode with a lot of hallucinations. Yeah, because life isn’t simple enough if you don’t learn that you are bipolar just after giving birth.
In more detail, it’s hard to find the words… In terms of psychological pain, it was incredibly violent. I described it as 100 times more painful than the contraction that made me scream during my delivery. My thoughts were going fast, so fast, as if a cyclone was passing over my brain.
I knew nothing about what a manic episode could look like. I knew nothing about postpartum psychosis, and neither did the people around me.
I didn’t let go of control until I felt my son and my husband were safe with my parents and my sister (whom I thank infinitely for all their support).
Once I let go, the manic crisis took full hold. I believed I had understood something crucial that explained all the world’s ills. I hallucinated in every sense, and I would forget what I had been told just an hour earlier.
I experienced dissociation: I doubted what was real or not (like Peeta in The Hunger Games). I relived my most painful griefs, doubting whether my loved ones had actually died or not (hallucinating about some kind of time travel, I doubted what the date was).
I hallucinated going through the delivery again and then believed I had 2, 5, or even 29 children, to the point of asking at a psychiatric appointment: “How many children do I have?”. Fun fact: when I believed I had 2 children, I believed they were twins, and I named one “Maël” and the other “Maëlle”.
I first thought it had stopped, and then it came back. I would loop through day-night routines, not knowing how time was passing. With each routine, I would shower to try to fight the infernal heat caused by the heatwave and my overheating brain.
I was hospitalized at Bichat, and I regret that they didn’t start me on the lithium I so desperately needed to stabilize me. I also regret that they didn’t do more to help me re-anchor myself in reality, though admittedly it was probably hard to do.
Then, once I was barely stabilized, I was sent to the mother-and-baby unit of the Kremlin-Bicêtre. There I was very well supported, but unfortunately I relapsed, halfway between mania and depression.
It was then, within the Pinel unit, that the diagnosis was finally made: I am bipolar. At first I didn’t understand — I had only ever had one depression before that. But later I read “Goupil ou face”, a graphic novel about bipolarity, and it helped me understand and accept. I’m not sure I had any big mood swings—or at least, no more than most people do—but learning that I was neurodivergent wasn’t a big surprise. I know very well what calms me, and those are the same things that soothe autistic people.
Overall experience of postpartum psychosis: 0/10, would not recommend.
The recovery
It would be unfair to end on this note, so let me tell you a bit about my recovery process.
The first step is to stop the mania. This is done with sedatives. In my case, it meant being sedated to the point where I could barely talk and could not find the shared washroom on my own. Some of the sedatives cause trembling, so you get a medication typically used for Parkinson’s. I could barely write because of the trembling.
The sedatives are temporary, until the lithium kicks in. However, lithium dosage also needs to be calibrated so you receive enough to be effective but not so much that it strains your kidneys unnecessarily.
Then, when the lithium is well adjusted, you start very progressively, removing the sedatives one at a time and making sure mania does not come back. This process takes weeks, with each week dedicated to gradually reducing or removing one medication.
With bipolarity also comes the possibility of swinging the pendulum in the other direction: after mania, you may fall into depression. The lithium limits the severity of that depression but cannot always prevent it entirely, especially for major manic episodes like mine. At first I didn’t believe I would fall into depression; I had too much support and too many great things in my life. This was a naive view. It’s mostly chemistry in my brain. I could do things to improve my chances (like journaling, sports, etc.), but it only got me so far. When we removed one of my last medications, it became very clear that I had fallen into depression.
The depression is then treated with an antidepressant, but you cannot take too much, or you risk falling back into mania or hypomania. Isn’t bipolarity fun?
I can’t talk about my recovery without speaking of the “unité mère bébé”. I spent two months there, and it allowed me to be with my baby while the psychiatric team adjusted my treatment and to have the professional support I needed to take care of my baby. Without that institution, I probably wouldn’t have felt anything close to a normal maternity leave. My only complaint (not specific to the place I went) is that it was only focused on the mother-baby relationship, and in our case, Eloi also fell into a depression from all the stress.
The support
I want to thank my family and friends for all they did to get me through this:
- for seeing the first signs with a worried eye,
- for listening to my nonsense when I was in mania,
- for calling all over the place when the hospital lost my trace in the transfer between Saint-Anne and Bichat,
- for being patient with me while I came down from mania and realized just how much I hallucinated,
- for taking care of my son while I couldn’t,
- for doubling down on your support while I relapsed,
- for always showing me your love and affection.
Note: This article was written in part in French and then translated by AI.
