Adele shares best friend’s ‘traumatic’ account of postpartum psychosis

Adele has shared a friend's account of her experience with postpartum psychosis.

The singer took to Instagram last night to link to her best friend Laura's story of "the biggest challenge of her life" - becoming a mother. Adele wrote that Laura's story was "intimate, witty, and heartbreaking" and urged new mothers to speak out if they weren't feeling like themselves after giving birth. She shared a photo of herself and Laura and linked to the new mother's blog post in her bio. In the candid post, Laura wrote that her birth had been "traumatic" and that the postpartum psychosis that followed was "the worst time of my actual life." She gave a list of things that happened to her after giving birth to her baby boy six months ago, describing ".. hell; mania, mood swings, insomnia, delusions, paranoia, anxiety, severe depression with a lovely side order of psychosis." https://www.instagram.com/p/BmbSyYwho-B/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=embed_loading_state_control "I thought that time would heal," Laura wrote.

"We pushed through the next few weeks but I knew I wasn’t right, I was hiding the congratulations cards and my own air made me feel sick, my baby was feeding non stop. "I barely had time to eat or wash and didn’t sleep a single hour- this is all the usual new Mum stuff I know- but this wasn’t me, I felt like I had pushed out my personality as well as a baby."

Laura went on to say that she felt like a "ticking time bomb" and that nighttime became a kind of mania where it felt like she was doing everything really quickly. "I was dazed and couldn’t take in the simplest information," she said.

"I would write weird scraps of stuff down on odd bits of paper about my sons routine to try and remind myself but they meant nothing. And then I would be hit with extreme lows where I felt like the world was caving in. I went from wanting to do everything for my little boy to completely ignoring his cries."

After a while, Laura's psychosis became so bad that she even believed her son's father was trying to kidnap him. Eventually, she was hospitalised for two weeks.

"After my intervention- which was the worst night of my life- I was hospitalised for 2 weeks away from my son, bleeding from birth, breasts leaking milk and fully out of my head. "I had no idea where I was. I would sit in group therapy all day every day feeling like my baby had been torn out of my arms."

Laura said that her experience may make her seem weak to some, but speaking about her experience has made her stronger. "Birth and motherhood is a shock to the system and traumatic and we shouldn’t have to suffer in silence," she said. You can read the rest of Laura's post here.