Postpartum depression made me feel hopeless. Not Today.

Music to my ears

Carole Dagher looks back on her childhood in a little village in southern Lebanon called Dahr El Maghara with great fondness.  She was related to pretty much everyone in town, who all shared the same last name.  She recalls idyllic pastoral family picnics among the olive groves, feasting on Lebanon’s famous Tabbouleh salads.

Unfortunately, Carole’s childhood changed drastically around the age of seven, when the civil war forced her family to move to Beirut, where she and her five sisters lived in a bomb shelter for the majority of the next five years.

“It was a dark and scary place for all of those years. We had to wait until the sirens announced a ceasefire before we could go to our apartment to do things like take a shower and get food.”

When she was 12, her family came to Canada as landed immigrants to escape the Lebanese civil war.  Despite being deprived of a normal childhood and only knowing a single word of English when she immigrated to Canada, she was a gifted student, eventually graduating from law school and starting out her law career as an associate at a top New York law firm and is now  a top lawyer and VP at one of Canada’s largest companies.  Life was good and was about to get even better with the arrival of her first child.

Then about five days after becoming a mother, she was suddenly hit with the full force of postpartum depression.

“I got out of bed and immediately realized something was off. I felt scared, incompetent and didn’t think I could be a good mother. I cried all the time. I wanted to stay in my room and not interact with anybody. I just felt really hopeless.”

She also fought hard against the suggestion that it had anything to do with mental illness.

“I pride myself on being a perfectionist who always excelled in every aspect of her life and I surrounded myself with equally established people, so I thought that if I were to seek help I would be viewed as weak and incompetent.  That was a major barrier for me.”

Up to 75 per cent of women experience some form of what is sometimes called the “baby blues” right after childbirth.  For the majority of women, the symptoms are relatively minor and subside within a week or ten days.  But women who experience the baby blues are four times as likely to develop post-partum depression and experience major and sometimes life-threatening symptoms. 

Now there is ongoing research at CAMH that is giving real hope to new mothers struggling with their mental health.  With the help of cutting-edge brain imaging available at CAMH, Senior Scientist Dr. Jeffery Meyer discovered that a specific type of protein in the brain that impacts mood regulation surges to higher levels in woman just after childbirth. He developed a customized nutritional supplement intended to compensate for that surge that has shown great promise in reducing or even eliminating the baby blues and therefore greatly reducing the risk of postpartum depression.

“That is music to my ears,” says Carole. “I have two daughters now and they may decide to become mothers and I hope when that day comes there is an advancement that could make post-partum depression a thing of the past.  I think it’s incredible that CAMH is doing research like this focused specifically on women.”

Although her postpartum depression is behind her, mental illness remains a dominant feature in her life in the form of treatment-resistant major depressive disorder and anxiety disorder, and she has received extensive treatment for both at CAMH. While some days are better than others, she says that knowing that CAMH is also working towards breakthroughs in research that show real promise for even the most treatment-resistant mental illnesses is a source of comfort and hope.

"I honestly believe that supporting CAMH research is one of the most important things than anyone can do. If you know someone who suffers from mental illness or you have suffered yourself, you understand how difficult it is to live with it and see people that you love struggle from it. 

"People with mental illness can feel like they have no future, which is why it is so important that institutions like CAMH can continue to innovate with new treatments.  I am asking people to support CAMH because I have seen first-hand how CAMH changed my life and gave me the hope I need to go on another day.”