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Living with perinatal OCD

02 November 2018
Mother's voice
02 November 2018
Volume 26 · Issue 11

Abstract

Obsessive compulsive disorder can have devastating effects on new parents, but is under-researched and poorly understood. Catherine Benfield explains the condition and what midwives can do to help

If you had told me 5 years ago that at some point in the future I would be talking to midwives about the nature of my intrusive thoughts, I would be amazed. Amazed and terrified. That's because 5 years ago I was unknowingly experiencing perinatal obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). I was having the most intensely graphic, unwanted, recurring intrusive thoughts about harming my newborn son and, as lovely as I'm sure you all are, you were the last people I wanted to tell about it. I was worried that if I did, you'd begin the proceedings to have my son taken out of my care.

I've lived alongside undiagnosed OCD since childhood, but I didn't recognise intrusive thoughts, which I started experiencing almost straight after childbirth, as a symptom of the condition until I researched it myself, and had it confirmed in my first cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) session. By this point my son was 2—it had taken me 2 years to get help.

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