It affects up to 20% of women and can be as complex as depression at any stage of life. But support is there
- The modern mind is a column where experts discuss mental health issues they are seeing in their work
“I want to be a good mother but I’m afraid. I didn’t have a good childhood.”
The nurse held back tears as she told me what the patient had told her. Involuntarily, I felt the prick of tears too, at her horror and the patient’s, conveyed in the recollection. It wasn’t that the abuse was violent or at a very young age. The betrayal of a child’s trust is hard to hear. The patient’s mother, herself neglected and vulnerable in childhood, had been largely unavailable, sometimes frightening, and immersed in her own addictions; her stepfather, the gentler parent, was also a substance user and had abused her, even as she tried to support him, so he could provide care for her.