How Autobiography Helps Health Professionals Understand Women’s Experience of Postpartum Psychosis - Dr Diana Jefferies

Dr Diana Jefferies is a senior lecturer in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University. She has a clinical background in mental health and HIV/AIDS nursing and an academic background in the humanities. It is this interdisciplinary combination of knowledge that has sparked her interest in exploring how women make meaning of their mental distress after childbirth, their access to healthcare, their response to treatment, and any strategies they may use to promote recovery.

One method of accessing how women make meaning of their experience of postpartum mental distress is through published autobiography. As this is the woman’s writing, unmediated by the health professional’s lens, their thoughts about their illness become a pure distillation of their experience. This experience can then be read against current clinical knowledge and guidelines to identify if gaps in services exist and could be improved from these personal accounts.

Dr Jefferies will discuss three autobiographies of women’s accounts of postpartum psychosis, which occurs in 1-2 women in 1000 in the first four to six weeks following childbirth. This condition is a frightening and traumatic experience involving rapid mood swings, hallucinations, delusions and confused thinking. Many women are reluctant to disclose their symptoms as they worry about the consequences of having a mental illness after childbirth, such as losing custody of their child. Even though women may recognise there is something wrong, they may not receive treatment until the illness has become very severe.

These autobiographies are:

• The Book of Margery Kempe (c.1400), Oxford University Press (2015)
• Thomas Walsh, Amanda (2022): A Mother’s Mind: A Story of Postnatal Psychosis, Anxiety and Depression, Green Olive Press.
• Beetson, Ariane (2024): Because I’m Not Myself: A Memoir of Motherhood, Madness and Coming Back from the Brink, Black Inc.

Reading about women’s experience of postnatal psychosis from the early 15th century to the present demonstrates a longitudinal view of an illness that remains constant. It is from this perspective that it can be read against current clinical guidelines to ensure that women have optimum health accounts.

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