Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes discusses her experience with postnatal depression in new podcast series
Trigger warning: Some topics discussed in this article are of a sensitive nature
Deputy First Minster Kate Forbes has spoken about her experience with postnatal depression on the new series of the podcast, Speaking of Suicide.
Ms Forbes first spoke out last year about her battles after her daughter Naomi was born in August 2022, and has now delved further into her story in the episode.
It’s estimated that at least one in 10 women suffer from postnatal depression and suicide is the number one cause of death for mums in the first year after giving birth in the UK.
Ms Forbes shared her story on the podcast from Mikeysline and Adventurous Audio with the host Pennie Latin.
Speaking about her first days of being a mother, she said: “At the beginning, I didn’t understand why people seemed to love giving birth and having children.
“I just couldn’t even contemplate why people would go on to have another child after they’d had their first.
“But now she’s almost two years old and I absolutely love it!”
Ms Forbes shares about what her expectations for motherhood were and finding out the reality was ‘unimaginably different’ to what she had expected.
She continued: “The first night I was on a high. I was completely numb from the waist down. But that high quickly disappeared as they had to whisk her away to the special baby unit and that was the first moment I felt like ‘I don’t like this’ and worry and anxiety and fear about what was going to happen to her.
“I just thought I needed to get out of hospital. But I got home and that’s when the night and day terrors started.
“I was overwhelmed by fear for the baby’s health and I thought I would cause her pain and suffering so it would be better for me to be elsewhere.
“I couldn’t bathe or lift her. I was convinced that somebody was going to cause us harm. But I was keeping it under control and pretending everything was fine. I was smiling and giving the right answers as a professional politician irrespective of how I felt inside.”
Within a week Ms Forbes couldn’t speak without being in tears but she assumed it was a side effect from the pain relief medication she had been on.
Her husband Ali mentioned postnatal depression and Ms Forbes said she dismissed it.
“When he read out the symptoms, I just thought ‘tick tick tick’ but I still dismissed it.
“The midwife then went through the survey they use and I felt almost every question hit the nail on the head for me.
“I felt fear, overwhelming sorrow and sadness, and that everything would be fine if I wasn’t there.
Ms Forbes shares on the podcast how she is ‘genuinely astonished by the lack of understanding of an issue that impacts so many women.
She said: “I am still astonished by the lack of understanding of an issue that affects so many women. I mean, I’m genuinely astonished by how little resource and research there is into pregnancy and women’s health issues in and around pregnancy, considering the impact it has on 1000s upon 1000s of women, and nobody in this world exists, that hasn’t put a woman through some form of pregnancy.
“So that I find remarkable, just the lack of understanding.
“For some women it comes and goes. And for some women it descends rapidly.
“I have to commend the NHS Highland, midwives and doctors as they really couldn’t have done more. I think that is rare based on what other women have shared with me but I am so impressed with how quickly they acted and put in place support that I probably would have dismissed if they hadn’t forced it on me.”
Ms Forbes speaks about why she decided to share her story and that she is now campaigning to make sure women are supported during and after pregnancy.
“I just wanted to speak about it because there are a number of women who go through it and don’t get help.
“But there is help. I thought maybe I could talk about it and show people that it’s not a big fat fail, you just need help.”
Ms Forbes said her pathway to recovery was accepting there was something wrong - not with her - but that there was something irrational going on.
“Speaking to someone and downloading everything to the midwife helped.
“In the weeks and months that followed, there were doctors who made me feel like it was a ‘passing thing’ but there were others who could not have been better and made regular appointments and check-ups.
“I went down the talking and therapy route.”
Speaking about how long it took for her to feel that things were improving, she said: “There were a few moments where I felt the sun was shining and it didn’t feel miserable
“When winter came I thought I had more happiness in the rain than I did when the sun was shining in August.
“At Christmas, there was still an echo but the real depth had passed by then.”
She said that it has changed her as a politician and has given her more compassion, empathy and concern for women’s health.
Other stories in the Speaking of Suicide series include Paul Cameron who turned to Tik Tok to help him recover from his depression and suicidal thoughts and make some order out of a chaotic childhood background; Inverness mother, Aileen, who talks candidly about the impact of her husband taking his life leaving her with three very young children and how she decided to tell them; Highland based poet Sheila Lockhart talks about how losing her brother to suicide was the inspiration for her remarkable poetry collection ‘Brother’; Film-maker Tom van den Hurk talks about how his own suicide attempt was part of the inspiration for his film about suicide, filmed on Arran, A Little While Longer; and, Georgia, a trainee paramedic from Aberdeenshire, talks about how the profound shock of finding her brother when he ended his life, has impacted on her ever since.
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