As a self-confessed ‘flaming extrovert’, Lauren struggled with the isolating and all-consuming eat-play-sleep-bathe-repeat cycle of early motherhood. By six months postpartum, the newborn ‘love bubbles’ that she felt so intensely after both of her births became overshadowed by the onset of postpartum depression.

From IVF, miscarriage, severe pregnancy health complications, to two traumatic births, this depression was only the latest in a long line of anxiety and trauma that Lauren experienced on the journey to motherhood.

In this powerful episode, Lauren opens up about her mental health during her pregnancy and postpartum with both of her daughters, and shares with us what helped her through this time - from the PANDA National Helpline (1300 726 306), medication, talk therapy, EMDR, and a psychiatric hospital admission, to her supportive and loving partner, Alex.

While walking the sunny halls of the psychiatric hospital, Lauren created her blog ‘Mental as a Mother’ and is now a volunteer for PANDA. You can follow Lauren on Instagram at @mental.asamother where she hilariously shares all things motherhood, mental health, fertility, and feminism - while wearing her signature bold lip, of course.

“We have been on quite a journey through IVF, and miscarriage, and both births and then postnatal. I’m not one to glow when pregnant - let’s put it that way.”

“I had PNDA with both, but much worse with my second daughter… With both of my daughters, it really hit me when they were six months old - the depression.”

“Looking back, I’ve had anxiety probably forever, I just didn’t label it as such. I hadn’t been diagnosed.”

“Throughout my twenties and thirties, I had bouts of mild to moderate depression and had seen a psychologist, several psychologists, over the years. I’d never had to take medication before, I’d been able to get on top of that with lifestyle changes - exercise, not drinking, regular talk therapy, that type of thing.”

“I was lucky enough to experience a beautiful newborn love bubble with both of mine, but I get to that six-month mark and I just fall into a big dark hole, and particularly with my second daughter - it was much, much worse.”

“I wasn’t particularly maternal, I actually never thought that I wanted children. It wasn’t until I turned about 35 or 36, it felt like a biological emergency.”

“With Ivy, I was depressed towards the end of my pregnancy. I was quite sick the first half with nausea, but no vomiting. But around the beginning of the third trimester, I started experiencing really severe carpel tunnel syndrome in my hand, and it was largely to do with all the swelling.”

“It started as just the regular garden-variety of carpel tunnel with tingling hands, but it progressed to really severe nerve compression and crushing pain in my hands. So I would get to the evenings and have my hands in a bucket of ice before I went to bed, and then I’d go to bed with frozen bags of peas, propped up with my arms rested on those just to try to get some sleep, and I’d wake up every hour and have to get up and shake my arms out.”

“So for three months before I even had the baby, I was really sleep deprived, and obviously that really messes with your mental health. By the time I had her, I was exhausted and quite anxious and I would wake up from dreams that trucks were running over my hands - that’s how bad the pain was.”

Due to low fetal movement towards the end of her pregnancy, Lauren was induced. “Within about 14 hours, I’d been awake all night having back-to-back, very intense contractions, and I was already exhausted, and only a few centimetres dilated.”

“By the time it was time to push, my epidural wore off and then Ivy got stuck. I’d pushed for nearly two hours in birth suite and they ended up preparing me for an emergency ceasar, but we were going to theatre to try to get her out with the vacuum first.”

“So they gave me morphine but hadn’t told me, and morphine makes me vomit. So it just went from this really peaceful - Alex and I, and our midwife in a dimly lit birth suite with beautiful music on and fairy lights - to all the lights on, 20 people in the room.”

“I felt like I was being talked about, not talked to. I’d gained a lot of weight in pregnancy, they were referring to my maternal BMI in front of me as though I wasn’t there.”

“And I was just naked and stuck on my back and couldn’t move from the epidural… I was naked and vomiting as they were transferring me to a gurney, and just no dignity in that experience whatsoever.”

Ivy was born during the second attempt with the vacuum. “And they put her on my tummy and I remember her sliding straight off. I was so out of it from the morphine, I didn’t even realise she was my baby.”

“I was really lucky, Ivy looked up at me and as soon as we had eye contact I just had this massive rush of oxytocin, and the effects of the morphine just wore off… and I was just completely in love with her and completely lucid and back in the room and in the moment.”

Unfortunately, Ivy had to be taken to resus and the special care nursery. “And we were separated for a few hours and I just found that so difficult because I was completely lucid, I had this massive rush of adrenaline having just met my beautiful baby. Then I was just wheeled to recovery and left there, there was nobody with me, no nurses.”

For two to three hours, Lauren was left alone and had to fight to see Ivy. Within a few hours though, they were reunited in the room and recovering. “It was a wild start to my mothering journey for sure, and I had a tear and all of that so you know, none of that’s very fun to recover from!”

“I’d really only planned as far as the birth… I actually didn’t prepare much at all for motherhood, I was just so invested in this beautiful natural birth.”

“So yeah, I had a lot of grief which I didn’t realise at the time - I was sort of riding that newborn wave but it definitely caught up with me later on.”

“Looking back, it actually probably hit me earlier [than six months]. So Alex had six weeks off work, which was beautiful. We had six weeks in the love bubble but then she went back to her full-time job. And I remember when Ivy was eight-weeks old, I don’t know what it was, but we just had one of those weeks where it seemed like she cried for three days straight and she would only sleep if she was on top of me, and I couldn’t go to the toilet, I couldn’t put her down to do anything. And I remember walking into the next room and just yelling ‘will you shut the f up?’”

“And then I called Alex and said… ‘I’m not cut out for this, we need a nanny, I need to go back to work.’”

Within a few weeks though, Lauren made it to the end of the fourth trimester and began to find motherhood rewarding.

“So I had definitely struggled early on but I guess it was just normal adjustment to parenthood. But at the six-month mark, what it looked like was me just feeling like I just couldn’t get off the couch. Ivy absolutely loved Elmo and Sesame Street so I would just put Sesame Street on and sit her on the squishy mat in the lounge room with her toys, and I would feed her and do the whole eat-sleep-change-bathe-repeat cycle but other than that I didn’t really take her out, I didn’t go to the library, I didn’t do anything. I just flopped on the couch, and then felt terribly guilty for doing that.”

“Ivy was a really tricky sleeper, so I guess I felt like I was doing something really wrong.” This was exacerbated by an interaction with a child nurse telling her that it was Lauren’s anxiety causing Ivy not to sleep well. “So I really internalised that as ‘I’m doing something wrong, I’m not any good at this’. And that definitely contributed a lot… I needed support, not judgment.”

“I had a great psychologist and I’d actually seen her for years so she knew me very well and when I went and shared with her how I was feeling she said ‘it might be time we think about a low-dose antidepressant’. And that was the first time I’d taken one. But I went on an SSRI and I felt better within a few days, so that made the world of difference for me.”

“I’d also planned to have a whole year off work but I ended up going back two days a week when Ivy was nine months old, and that also just helped me feel like my old self again… and then I enjoyed my days home with her so much more.”

When Ivy was two, Lauren and Alex decided to have another baby.

“My second go of it is where I really, really got sick.”

IVF and conception brought more challenges, and anxiety, the second time around. Unfortunately, Lauren experienced a miscarriage after the first transfer, and the second transfer did not take. The third transfer brought her Luca.

“I was really delighted to be pregnant again, and the pregnancy itself was much easier, I’d had a carpel tunnel release surgery in preparation for the second pregnancy, so that wasn’t a problem for me.”

“I stayed on my anti-depressant with that pregnancy and I was really well.”

Unfortunately, Lauren experienced hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) during her pregnancy with Luca.

“I was violently sick from the day I started taking the [embryo-transfer] medication… and I was sick right the way through. I had about a six-week reprieve at about the 26-week mark, I stopped vomiting for six weeks and I thought it was over but then it started again at 32 weeks.”

“I was so sick that I would vomit to the point of having petechial haemorrhaging - so burst blood vessels under the skin in my face. My face would look like I had the measles or something, I would just be covered in red spots and burst blood vessels in my eyes. I was just so so sick.”

“The hyperemesis was definitely pretty brutal and so with Luca we were watching her growth really closely on scans because I was throwing up so much.”

Lauren had planned for a water birth at home, but unfortunately Luca’s growth was measuring very little and Lauren’s blood pressure was up, so once again she was induced.

“But I wanted to replicate that homebirth experience as much as possible... so again, we had just Alex and I and our midwife, I booked a birth photographer knowing it was the last time we were every doing this, I had our wedding playlist playing in the birth suite, we had fairy lights on, and beautiful photos of Ivy to get that oxytocin going, and did everything we could”.

“I was so relaxed and coping so well. I had prepared, I had done a hypnobirthing course, I’d been having massages and acupuncture and raspberry leaf tea, and bouncing on a ball, and expressing colostrum and absolutely everything I could to prepare.”

The cervical dilation gel was enough to put Lauren into labour without the syntocinon drip and Lauren had a quick birth.

“So I had that beautiful birth, I had the golden hour, she did the breast crawl, we had delayed cord clamping, all of that, it was lovely and we got beautiful photography!”

“But what we didn’t know, while I was lying on my back, was that I was haemorrhaging. So an hour after she was born, I had a massive postpartum haemorrhage and lost two and a half litres of blood.”

“I ended up having to go to theatre and have a procedure done to stop that so again I was separated from her.”

“Witnessing the haemorrhage for [Alex] was quite extreme. I mentioned that before we had a birth photographer, and there’s a photo of her in black-and-white standing in the hallway holding Luca, teeny-tiny newborn Luca, they’ve just wheeled me down to theatre, and she thought she’d lost me and she was standing in the hallway thinking ‘I’m gonna be raising two kids alone’ because no one can lose that much blood and survive.”

“But once all of the drama of that was over, the next morning when I was back in the room with her, again I had that immediate, completely in love, tiger-mummy ‘I will do anything to keep you safe’ kind of feeling.”

Due to anaemia, Lauren had to be supported by Alex after the surgery for the remainder of her hospital stay.

“On the third day, I was having an iron infusion and we were actually getting ready to go home, and then Luca went completely limp and blue, and was rushed to resuc - I thought that we’d lost her.”

Luca had experienced a dusky episode resulting in four nights in special care.

“So that was all pretty scary and traumatic, but once we got home I was fine. I was back in that love bubble. I was so enamoured with the baby. We had a really beautiful few months.”

“I went back to work when she was six months old this time and I went back four days a week.”

“I think I went back to work in early March… something clicked around that February mark and it was probably the beginning of my PND, where I thought I was ready to go back to work now. This endless cycle of eat-play-sleep repeat… yeah, I really hit that point in February where I was desperate to go back to work.”

"And I think the depression definitely hit me again then, but I sort of pushed through it for a few months.”

“But I think I took on too much… I think that was a big part about why I fell in such a hole, I’m needed at work, I’m needed at home, you know, what’s left for me?”

“I was so on the look out for my mental health with Luca after having had the experience with Ivy. And that time when I was on the look out and doing all the right things, that’s the time I got the sickest!”

“It didn’t get really bad until she was eleven months old. That’s when I got to the point where I just felt everyday like I was walking around neck-deep in wet concrete. It felt like every tiny task was too much, just getting up off the couch felt like I was too tired.”

“For someone who talks as much as I do - like, I work in communications, I talk and communicate for a living! - I was almost monosyllabic, I couldn’t even look Alex in the eye properly because I just felt so ashamed of how useless I felt. I couldn’t do anything around the house, I felt like a complete burden. I didn’t want to hurt myself but I did feel like I was a burden and everyone would be better off if I wasn’t there because I was just another thing for Alex to deal with.”

“I was still in love with my baby but I really wanted a break. So I booked a couple nights in a hotel, and I went and had a Friday and Saturday night in a hotel by myself. But when I came home I still wasn’t really any better.”

“I wasn’t sleeping well, even though I was completely exhausted, I had really dreadful insomnia. And I went to my GP and they changed my anti-depressant from the SSRI that I was on to a different medication that was meant to try and help me sleep better, but coming off my SSRI my serotonin just crashed. And four weeks after the medication change, that’s when I was really, really dark and struggling to function.”

“So I went back to my doctor and said ‘look, these new meds aren’t working, I feel worse’. And she saw the state of me that day. And I was reassuring her, I was afraid to disclose how unwell I was because I was worried about [Luca] being taken off me or something like that!”

“So I kept stressing ‘I don’t want to kill myself and I don’t want to hurt my baby’ and she just looked at me and said ‘Lauren, you don’t have to want to hurt yourself or your baby to need help. And I think we’re at the point where you really need some more help and we should consider some time in hospital.”

“And I didn’t even know mum-and-baby-units existed! But she told me about one at Belmont Private which was only 20 minutes from my house, so I was so, so lucky to have a private MBU close to home who had a space coming up within the next couple of days, and so we made plans for me to go.”

Lauren had already chosen not to bring, Luca, then 11 months old, into the MBU anyway. “I’d prefer to come in without her because I really want a rest, I needed a break.”

“But the day I was meant to go in, I was all packed up and they called me and they said ‘we’ve just had to give your bed to someone else’… and for me, that was really triggering, because so much of why I was depressed was because I felt like my needs always came last.”

Lauren was provided the choice of staying home until a bed in the MBU became available, or getting admitted to the acute ward and transferring to the MBU when a spot was available. “I did still choose to be admitted to the main part of the hospital, and I spent two nights out there before an MBU bed came up.”

“By the time I did get into the mum-and-baby unit, I only spent two nights in there because I’d already spent two nights out in the main part of the hospital and realised it wasn’t the scary place that I thought it was, it was just full of other sad, anxious people like me! And when I was in the MBU I found I was still quite overstimulated by all the noise of babies, all of the highchairs, and the mess at meal times, and the toys. And I didn’t connect with the other mums as much as I would have hoped because their babies were at totally different stages to mine.”

“So after two days I transferred back out to the main hospital and I spent nearly three weeks there!”

“I met all sorts of people, I made great friends, I did programs, I painted, I got rest - that was the main thing! And I’m really grateful, I love the psychiatrist that I was admitted under. He and I got along really well, and I think that was a big part of it for me, if I hadn’t really connected with my doctor I probably would have struggled.”

“He changed me back to my previous medication straight away but he upped the dose a little bit. So I was on a very low dose and he doubled it. He also prescribed something to help with my anxiety which I take as PRN, which is as required, so I still take that to this day if I need it.”

“He put me on something that helped me sleep at night to the point where I was waking up at 4.30 in the morning bright-eyed and bushy tailed, and that’s when I actually started my website and started blogging about perinatal mental health.”

“I just feel like every day that I spent in hospital my nervous system exhaled a little bit more and by the time I came home, it was like I had just come down a few levels!”

“And the three weeks actually went by really, really quickly, and it was the best thing I’d ever really done.”

“I still go back there now as an outpatient to see my psychiatrist every six weeks for my medications and sometimes I just pull up and wish I could just stay the night!”

“It’s just a safe, calm place to get better.”

"I do all the right things and I can still sometimes feel really overwhelmed and get really low… but just knowing that I’ve got my next appointment with my doctor coming up and I’ve always got that option of being able to go back in if I need to definitely is a load off.”

“It saved me. And I’ve been back! Six months later I actually went back in for a week.”

In addition to medication, talk therapy, her psychiatrist, and her psychiatric hospital admission, Lauren’s healing has also been aided by EMDR - eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing.

“I’d had EMDR even before I’d had my kids, but I’ve had it to deal with my birth trauma for both occasions.”

“So you recall the event, sit in the feelings, notice where in the body you’re feeling it… and you just watch this ball go back and forth as you sit in that feeling and slowly, over 30 or 60 seconds, it releases. It’s the most bizarre treatment!”

“There’s another way that [my psychologist] does it where she has a long stick that she holds up that has a little node on the end that I stare at, and she finds a point in my vision, I look around and there’s a certain eye position where you feel that feeling most intensely, and then I stare at the stick as I sit in that feeling and it slowly releases.”

“And for that horrible memory of Luca turning blue and going to resus - I did EMDR for that. I still feel those emotions really intensely because that’s my baby! At the time I definitely felt like it helped a lot, but I don’t think I’ll ever look back on that and not well up if I’m describing it to someone.”

It was because of her journey that Lauren began a blog to share her experiences and to advocate for perinatal mental health.

“I’d always told stories, I’m a natural storyteller, I work in communications. When I had Ivy, I would talk to friends and they used to always say ‘you should start a blog, it’s so funny hearing you talk about it.’”

“But when I was in the hospital after having PND with Luca, I did think ‘ok this is interesting, someone sharing a real story of quite extreme perinatal mental health and being open and honest about being in a hospital’ I thought this might help somebody if it can reduce some stigma, because you know, I’m a high functioning person and I try and do all the right things and it happened to me.”

“For me it’s so, so rewarding when anyone messages me to say ‘omg, I could have written this myself.’”

“So I started a website, I started writing longer form blogs, and then I started publishing those on Facebook and Instagram.”

“I’ve got so much that I want to say and do. I don’t aspire to be any kind of influencer, but I do aspire to be an advocate. And so, I think with having a platform and a big enough audience… just more of an opportunity to advocate for better support for perinatal mental health - that’s why I’m doing it.”

“Because it is so isolating. It’s so easy to think that you’re a pioneer and you’re the only one who’s ever felt this way… it’s just so much more common than we’d like to admit, and if anyone’s out there feeling like that I just hope that they know that they’re not alone, and that you don’t need to be ashamed, and help is available.”

Listen to the full episode:

Birth photos by Photography by Kristy Lee

Family photos by Kristina Wild and Stewart Portraits