POST PARTUM DEPRESSION IS NORMAL AND TREATABLE!

Salam everyone out there. I am an ex post partum depression patient. Alhamdulillah, it has been a good FOUR AND HALF YEARS. YES! I WANT TO SAY IT AGAIN.. AND FOUR AND A HALF YEARS since my last "anti depressant" medicine. You can read about my story dalam entry "Letter to Jessie Chung" as well as "Pengorbanan buat Suamiku". If I CAN, you also can regardless of any type of depression that you are currently facing.


Before we look into post partum depression, lets understand what does it mean with DEPRESSION.

Definition:
Depression is a disorder characterized by a pervasive depressed mood, pessimistic thoughts and feelings of despair and hopelessness, accompanied by a loss of interest in otherwise pleasurable activities and changes in eating and sleeping habits.

Symptoms:
Symptom of depression include fatigue, headaches, loss of interest in pleasurable things, weight loss or weight gain, lethargy, heart palpitations and inability to concentrate.

Causes:
Besides the emotional difficulties mentioned above, depression can be a result of prolonged stress, which causes a deficiency of amino acids, resulting in a biochemical imbalance. Other nutritional deficiencies, nervous tension, poor diet, mononucleosis, thyroid disorders, allergies and serious physical disorders can also cause depression.
Depression can definitely connected to brain depletion. When certain nutrients are not supplied to the brain, a negative set of emotions can occur that affect our ability to cope with stressful situations that we confront every day.

And this is how Post Partum Depression (PPD) comes about:

When you were conceived, three hundred million sperm were probably released. Those three million sperm then raced up your  mother's fallopian tubes to the recently released egg, one of thousands of eggs produced by her ovaries. Only one sperm was smart enough and a fast enough swimmer to beat all two hundred ninety nine million others, and that egg and that sperm united to become the miracle that is you. Whether your parents planned you or not, God did. And no matter how they treated you growing up, you are an eternal soul worthy of loving and being loved forever. Your child - whether already born or still growing in the womb- was also planned by God and is deeply loved by him.

There is no question that children are an incredible gift from God. Yet the fact remains that having a baby brings an immense amount of change to a family.All significant changes are stressful, even good ones, like getting married or taking a job promotion. For some women, the added responsibility, new routines, and surging hormones after childbirth combine to give them some form of what is called "post partum" depression. In fact 80 percent of women deal with some degree of post partum depression , ranging from a light case of what is sometimes called "postpartum blahs" or :baby blues" to the rare, worst case scenario of postpartum phychosis. The most likely to develop postpartum depression is within a few days after the birth of the baby, but it can come during pregnancy or even weeks after the baby is born.

Alhamdulillah! According to Paul Meir, M.D., Todd Clements, M.D. and Lynne Johnson, R.N "POST PARTUM DEPRESSION IS NORMAL AND TREATABLE". It doesn't signify a spiritual problem or a lack of gratitude for your baby. It is a stress related, hormonal problem, and it can be corrected.

There is hope and I had experienced it and HEALED from it. Tq Allah..I will share more on PPD in my next entry..Take care!