Postpartum anxiety, often misdiagnosed as depression, is beginning to catch the medical field’s attention. Jancee Dunn reports.
AFTER MANHATTAN PEDIATRICIAN Deena Blanchard, M.D., gave birth to her second son, in 2010, she was looking forward to, as she terms it, “four months of glorious maternity leave.” She planned on spending sweet, drowsy mornings bonding with her newborn in her Upper West Side apartment; enrolling in postnatal yoga; and taking long walks in Central Park. “I was going to totally engulf myself in new mom–hood,” she says.
But Blanchard was immediately consumed with paralyzing worry, barraging her husband and fellow doctors with phone calls. “I’d say, ‘I think he has reflux. I think he has a milk-protein allergy.’ ” She lost an alarming amount of weight—30 pounds in just six weeks. She couldn’t sleep. She took her son to a specialist and a lactation consultant as her thoughts swirled with “a never-ending cycle of ‘What if, what if, what if?’ ”
Standing in her humming office in the Flatiron District recently, clad in jeans and a lilac cashmere sweater (“The white lab coat scares kids”), Blanchard and her smooth chestnut bob telegraph confidence and capability. “That’s why anxiety is so deceptive,” she says. “I consider myself very accomplished, and at the time, I just felt like, ‘I don’t get it. I’ve had a baby before, and I’m a pediatrician.’ ” When debilitating panic attacks struck two weeks before she was due back at work, Blanchard finally took herself to a therapist. She was told she had postpartum anxiety. She had never heard of it.
This story is from the April 2018 edition of Vogue.
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This story is from the April 2018 edition of Vogue.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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