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Postpartum psychosis is a medical emergency. If you or someone you love is experiencing symptoms, Postpartum Support International's helpline is 1-800-944-4773 (call or text), and 988 is available 24/7.
If you're pregnant, postpartum, or love someone who is — send this to them.
Follow Ayana: @ayanagabriellelage | Missing Me → ayanalage.com/book
The Lindsay Clancy trial has put postpartum psychosis in front of a jury — and in front of everyone's FYP. Millions of people are hearing the words for the first time. We recorded this conversation more than a year before that trial began. While this is an encore episode, we feel like it's an important topic to talk about.
Ayana Lage is a freelance writer, content creator, and mom of two in Tampa. She's also the author of Missing Me: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis and the Long Road Back — and one of the one to two women in every thousand who give birth who experience postpartum psychosis. She did it after doing every single thing right. Antidepressant maintained through pregnancy. Therapist. Psychiatrist. Doula. A nurse for a sister. A loving husband. A family that never left. She knew the symptoms of postpartum depression cold. None of it stopped what happened ten days after her daughter was born.
She takes us through all of it: the strange euphoria in the first days, why not needing sleep is the warning sign almost everyone misses, the paranoia, the messages from God around day nine, the moment she told her family to get her to a hospital immediately — and the hallucinations that started the second she walked into the ER. She was inpatient for 17 days at the height of the pandemic with no visitors allowed. Her newborn was 27 days old when she got home. Doctors cycled through medications that didn't work and started discussing long-term residential care and electroconvulsive therapy before an old-school antipsychotic finally brought her back far enough to recognize that not everything she believed was real.
We also get into what came after: the guilt of missing her daughter's first month, taking a full year to feel like herself, and the four-year gap before she decided to do it again — this time with an overnight doula, formula from day one, and her husband on every night feed.
And Zara asks Ayana the question the Clancy case keeps circling and rarely lands on: whether a Black woman in psychosis would be given the same grace as a white nurse in a nice Massachusetts suburb. That answer, and everything around it, is the last ten minutes.
Ayana's memoir, Missing Me, is out now from Hachette. She built it from the notebooks she kept during her episode and from her own medical records — which means it contains the parts she couldn't access from memory alone. It's been praised by Publishers Weekly, Bustle, and the Tampa Bay Times, with blurbs from Kate Baer, Nora McInerny, and Jessica Zucker. If this episode hits you, the book is the long version. Order it here: ayanalage.com/book
This one covers postpartum psychosis, postpartum depression and anxiety, intrusive thoughts, postpartum OCD and rage, birth trauma and emergency C-sections, miscarriage and pregnancy loss, faith and mental illness, maternal mental health care in the US, and what it actually takes to survive the thing nobody warns you about.
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