A Personal Perspective: You might think you need to "gut it out" or "struggle through" your low-level mood/anxiety. It's not that bad, right? Consider treatment and relief.
While mental health stigma has decreased, medication is still stigmatized. Evidence shows benefits and safety.Long ago and far away, I was married to a family physician. I had two sparkly-eyed, adorable daughters, aged almost 2 and 5. I still breastfed the younger and was privileged to stay home. Both girls were born at home, in rural Oregon with a nurse-midwife.
As a nurse-midwife, I knew most of what there was to know about women’s reproductive health—or so I thought. But no one had taught mental health. At Yale, where I graduated with a master’s in nursing, one of my most brilliant faculty had faced mental health issues following a first birth. Her illness proved so severe her face became lax and erased of expression, and she appeared zombie-like and eerie, compared to her prior vivacious spirit.
To escape the house, I leveraged connections in our small-town medical community and wrangled a part-time job seeing outpatients at the practice where my husband worked. As the sole female provider joining a group of male family physicians, women flocked to me for annual exams. We would dispense with the physical part of the exam rather quickly but spend a long time talking. Talking about where these women were in their lives and where they wanted to go.
Finally, I phoned a friend in the city; someone I’d met on Labor & Delivery when she was a med student and I a nurse-midwife. She was a psychiatrist. I admitted my symptoms. “I think you’re depressed,” she said, confirming what even I now knew. She referred me to another psychiatrist who practiced women’s mental health—a nascent specialty at the intersection ofI don’t remember exactly what the psychiatrist asked in that initial visit or even my response.
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