PPD

The Odds & Bits Series : VII

We find clues to our understanding of life in the most unlikely places. Just yesterday I was reviewing the sensation of ' Eternal Life ' in our bodies and mind … but couldn't find the right way to communicate it. Then I remembered the publicized case of Brooke Shields and her experience of PPD ( Postpartum Depression ) and it hit me. Of course …

 

Our natural understanding of life begins … in the original … as an individual experience. Thereafter in the course of our living … it becomes subject to the influence of love … physical natures … social imperatives and our resistances and misgivings about some things. In going through the various experiences … we return to our original nature and understand with some refinement … the way it relates to us as individuals.

 

This would suppose that we lived our lives in the original as a dream … or some such content of experience. In losing contact with it … ( the fall ) … we are put through a course of public volition … to learn an appreciation … of what it was. Our learning takes many forms … including science … love … faith … discernment and so forth. Thereafter we bring it back to a social communication of its principles … in the common use of the language … and represent it in some way by reference to society and the world.

 

Shakespeare called the world ' a stage.' The Indics refer to life as a ' leela '( play ). But whatever the word we choose … it denotes a beginning and end to our search for meaning. Someone in the original experience of understanding life a certain way … has a baby … and after the delivery … finds herself involved in the life of another … like never before. This is bound to influence her original nature that was free and independent.

 

The depression that sometimes accompanies childbirth is experienced in relation to an experience lost and a new experience found. It is a structural change in the mind of the individual … and in the new role of mother … she comes to experience life anew. Research* into PPD created the finding ' that women experiencing postpartum depression are engaged in struggles of attempting to conform to culturally derived and interpersonally upheld expectations of motherhood, but in doing so feel disconnected from parts of themselves, from other people, and from the surrounding culture.'

 

' I wasn't being true to myself ' is one report of a comment by a respondent in the research. Its my opinion … that the respondent was referring to her original experience … and had not yet succeeded in founding a new identity … with respect to her role as mother. Albeit this is difficult to do … but the solution lies in the social experience … and with some help from father and the children … she can settle into a new experience.

 

Where the family's support is left for want … she takes recourse to support groups … that is reported as effective in its success to return the mother to some semblance of the original experience. I expect that the final outcome may be a combination of the two … but what is harder to answer … is whether the mother found the experience … a stage or play. It does provide an opportunity for understanding life.

 

 

 

*Note :  Silencing the Self Across Cultures: Depression and Gender in the Social World,  Edited by: Jack, Dana C., Ali, Alisha, Chapter 14 : ' I wasn't being true to myself : Women's narratives of Postpartum Depression, Mauthner, Natasha S, Oxford University Press,USA, 2010