The first year after a birth, when it goes wrong

The year after a birth is full of appointments, and nearly every one of them is about the baby. The baby is weighed, measured, checked and written up. You are the person holding them, and if anyone asks how you are, it is usually briefly, near the end, with the door already half open.

That is a strange setup for a time when many parents are struggling badly. This page is about the year as a whole: what it can feel like when it goes wrong, and how to get help from a system that was not built with a moment for "I am not coping".

Unwanted frightening thoughts about the baby are a separate subject, covered in their own guide. Intrusive thoughts in the perinatal period →

The questions are short and the answer is easy to get wrong

At some point you will probably be asked a handful of questions about your mood. They are quick. The person asking may be looking at the clock, and your baby may be crying in the next room.

It is very easy to answer "fine" in that moment. Many people do, and the usual reason is not that they are fine. It is that a true answer felt like it would open something they could not control.

If you answered in a way that was not true, you can go back. You could say: "When you asked me that last time I said I was okay. I wasn't being straight with you, and I would like to answer it properly." Nobody needs you to explain why you did it.

The fear that governs everything

For many parents there is one fear underneath all the others: that if they say how bad it really is, the baby will be taken away.

We cannot tell you what any particular service will do with what you say. That depends on where you live, who you speak to and what you describe, and anyone who promises you that nothing will happen is promising something they cannot know. What we can say is that this fear is very common, and that it is one of the main reasons people stay silent for months while getting worse.

The practical answer is to ask before you disclose. You are allowed to:

• Ask the question first, in general terms: "If a parent told you they were struggling badly, what would happen next?"
• Ask who will see what you say, and whether it goes in the baby's records or yours.
• Ask what support exists that is not a crisis response, such as extra check-ins or a specialist team.
• Bring someone you trust to ask these questions with you or for you.

Asking what a disclosure leads to is not an admission of anything. It is a reasonable thing to want to know.

Tiredness and despair can feel the same

Broken sleep is not a minor inconvenience on top of the rest. It makes everything harder to bear: your mood, your patience, your ability to think clearly, your sense of whether things will ever change.

That creates a trap. People tell you it is just exhaustion, you tell yourself the same, and you cannot tell whether what you feel is tiredness or something deeper. Often it is both, and one feeds the other.

Sleep deprivation is a real amplifier, not an excuse. "I am exhausted" and "I am not okay" can both be true. If the hopelessness is there even on a day when you have slept, that is worth telling someone.

Partners and non-birthing parents struggle too

If you are the partner, or the parent who did not give birth, you can be in this as well. The low mood, the dread, the numbness, the sense that you have made a mistake, the thoughts that you would be better off gone: none of that belongs only to the person who gave birth.

You are also much less likely to be asked how you are, and it is easy to decide that your job is to hold everything together for everyone else. You are allowed to be the subject of an appointment in your own right.

If you are worried about someone →

How to get yourself on the agenda

You do not have to wait for someone to ask the right question. Some ways to make the appointment about you:

• Say at the very start: "I would like some time today to talk about how I am doing, not just the baby."
• Book a separate appointment just for you, rather than trying to squeeze it in at the end of one that is about the baby. Say that when you book.
• Write down what you want to say and hand it over or read it out. It is hard to find words when you are tired and the baby is fretting.
• Ask directly whether there is a specialist perinatal route, a team for the pregnancy and first year after birth, and whether you can be referred to it.
• Take someone with you who can say the true thing if you cannot.

Getting a first GP appointment →

Words you can use →

Making a plan for the bad days

If some days are much worse than others, decide ahead of time what you will do on one. A plan written when you are thinking clearly is easier to follow than one you have to invent at the worst moment.

Make a safety plan →