Psychologist Amy Brown researches maternal and infant health, but when she has a child of her own, she’s confronted with the reality behind the research.
Dr. Amy Brown is an Associate Professor in Child Public Health at Swansea University where she researches experiences of becoming a mother, particularly around how babies are fed. She has published widely in how social, cultural and psychological barriers can damage breastfeeding and subsequently maternal wellbeing. Amy is fascinated by how culture defines motherhood, through pressurising mothers to have it all and enjoy ‘every precious moment’, whilst simultaneously devaluing their role. She also has three children of her own and switches between hearing women’s tales about becoming a mother and experiencing it first hand herself. Sometimes life feels like one long never ending ethnographic research project but offers her insight into these complex issues.
This story originally aired on June 2, 2017.
Story Transcript
So last night, about ten o’clock, I was sat on the sofa drinking a glass of champagne because this is how all good stories start, I think. The reason for the champagne was it my eight-year-old daughter’s birthday. Finally, she’d had a present. We’d got her into bed. It was all all right. I could finally sit down and start thinking about my talk for today.
So I had my glass of champagne in one hand and in the other hand I had my phone and I was Googling stuff, because I just wanted to check that I had things right. Because when I was asked to do this, I thought I've got a brilliant idea of what I could talk about. And I was thinking about this idea of life imitating art and art imitating life, but actually swapping that for science. So life imitating science, science imitating life.
This kind of becomes more apparent when I tell you a bit about myself. I’m a psychologist by background. I work in public health at the moment, but I've always explored why we do what we do, why we make the choices.
And the people around me, the people I work with, it’s quite novel, I think, working with human behavior because, unlike a lot of other disciplines, people often come to it quite late in life. They've often had experiences or they've had a different career and something has happened to them which has made them want to go into research.
So, for example, perhaps they had a parent who had dementia and they had a really tough time trying to get the right services for them. So I had colleagues who would come into academia to do that research to try and give those people a voice, to try and highlight the need for those services.
Now, as a psychologist by background, I have particular interests around developmental psychology, which is all about babies and how they developed. I also liked health psychology and clinical psychology, which was very much about well-being and health. So anxiety, depression, your identity, how you're a healthy person.
So these are my interests and I combined them with my undergraduate degree. I went into teaching, teaching psychology students, teaching childhood study students. And there I was, the academic there, teaching these things.
I would teach about what it was like to give birth without having given birth myself, what it was like to be a mother, what it was like to become a mother. And I would do these lectures, you know, This is how your baby should sleep. This is what your baby should eat. I was kind of like the ultimate expert, shall we say, in how to look after your child and how to be a mother. Because we all know, don’t we, you can just go and read the research articles and they'll tell you what this is really like.
And I would see my colleagues and they would be researching their own experiences, perhaps about their childhood autism or about how their parent had had dementia. I’m thinking, isn’t this and that valuable? Isn’t that lovely? They can really see the insight.
And I was missing that. I thought, well, wouldn’t it be lovely once I've had a baby, I'll be able to see how experience really matches my science.
So go back ten years, I just had my first baby. It was like any experience of becoming a mother. What you said to people wasn’t necessarily what it was like at all. I mean, when you have a baby, there is this strange almost public grouping of you, in a way, in that people think you can walk down the street and when you're pregnant they'll literally touch you, which is strange in itself. I mean, try it with someone who’s not pregnant, come and rub your stomach. No, don’t.
But they seem to kind of ask all about your life. You go to Tesco’s and you've got your baby in the buggy and you're completely sleep deprived, and someone will start asking you questions. Favorite one is always, “Is he good?” which means is he sleeping. No.
But you don’t tell them that. You say, “Oh, yes, he's so good. Yes, he's sleeping.” You lie because a good mother has a sleeping baby. You don’t want to not be a good mother.
And the favorite one is when complete strangers come up to you in Tesco’s and say, “Aren’t you lucky? This is the best thing that will ever happen to you.” What’s the other one? “Cherish those precious moments.” And, yes, put them aside.
So fast-forward a few months again. I always used to nod, by the way. Yes, yes. Best thing that’s ever happened. Wonderful, wonderful.
So I went back to work and I went back to my lecturing. And of course, absolutely everything had changed. I looked at my slides and I thought, Wow. This is something completely different.
One of the more amusing examples is that I used to teach about how you don’t need all these expensive toys for babies. You can give them some pots and pans and they'll bang about with them. They don’t need these expensive things. And of course then I had absolutely every expensive gadget there was.
But the part I really want to focus on, and obviously so much has happened in the last ten years, but the part I really want to focus on was when I was talking about these lectures about becoming a mother and about maternal well-being and about how mothers really felt. I got my slides up about postnatal depression and I'd read them out and I'd say, “Well, you know, fifteen percent of mothers have postnatal depression.”
But it’s suggested that perhaps the figures are higher because not every woman tells somebody that she had postnatal depression. And the little quirk there was that I was that woman with postnatal depression. I had had a hideous time after the birth, and I'd kind of kept going, kept going. And I'd come back and seen these slides and it was like some kind of surreal reality. I was reading them thinking, I've not told a soul. Well, I’d told my health visitor and I'd literally told about two friends. Otherwise, I'd absolutely, completely buried it.
Suddenly, I was that academic who was plunged into her own research experience but kind of the other way around. I'd become almost the science I taught, and it was such a strange experience.
So we’d read these slides about all these women not telling anybody and I'd say, “Well, people don’t tell their doctor because they're worried that someone would take the baby away.” And I'd know, really deep inside me, that that’s why I wouldn’t tell anybody -- because if somebody knew what a terrible mother I was, then somebody who would come and take my baby, wouldn’t they? But don’t let on to the students. Just keep smiling here. You know, just keep swimming.
Then we’d get to the next slide and we’d talk about the symptoms of postnatal depression. If you don’t know too much about it, it kind of has its similarities with depression, but actually there are some quite specific symptoms. The media would make you think that, postnatal depression, you don’t want to be a mother, you don’t love your baby, you don’t want them. But actually, often with postnatal depression, your baby is the most important thing in the world to you, but you think you're not good enough for them.
Two of the main symptoms, one of the main symptoms was anxiety. And there I was, people always used to say to me, “You're superwoman. I don't know how you do this. You're doing your PhD. You've got a tiny baby. You're really coping, aren’t you?” And I said, “Yes, it’s easy.” “Yeah, you know, you just carry on.” Whilst, inside, I was that person who, midway around my Tesco shop, would have to abandon my shop and run from the store because I couldn’t take it anymore. I was so anxious, the world was closing in.
And they talk about symptoms of complete sadness, feeling like you had a loss. I did the sadness. It was a feeling that you just could not stop crying because you'd lost something and you couldn’t figure out what it was. And the worst bit was when someone was nice to you.
I always remember the particular breakdown I had in Marks & Spencer’s, by the cheese. Because if you're going to have a breakdown, you know, this is not just any breakdown. This is a Marks & Spencer’s breakdown, and every time I see a Marks & Spencer’s advert…
But what happened was the public were doing their usual thing of coming over to it and admiring the baby, because they ignore you once you've had the baby. It’s all about them, not you.
So this older couple came over to me and the man was playing with my son in his pram. The woman turned to me and she said, “What about you? How are you feeling? It’s really tough, isn’t it?” And I just collapsed… I burst into tears and I was sobbing by the cheese in Marks & Spencer’s. And this poor woman, because I ran away from her, I really hope one day I meet her again and say I’m sorry.
But the irony of it that there I was, as the academic, telling everybody about postnatal depression when deep inside that was me, and it was this just strange colliding of worlds. My academic knowledge and then my real knowledge, it was almost like a film script written out for me.
One more example was when I turned to the next slide and they were talking about predictors of postnatal depression. You know, in psychology, you have the checklists. If you go on Google, you can diagnose yourself with absolutely anything you like really with these checklists. But you'd read down the checklist and you're like, “Oh, dear. This is me. Yes, keep going.”
And one of the ones was partner support. Ten years on about, we joke about this. It’s in all my lectures. But I remember going to the GP finally and then talking about it, and her saying, “Look, you really need some support from your partner. You really, really need this or you're going to end up really, really ill.”
So I talked to my husband and I said, “Look, I really, really need this support.” He said, “Right. I'll book a week off work.” He booked the workweek off work, and you know the science stereotyping slightly, but women like to talk about things and men like to do practical things to help. Well, he booked the week off work and he built me a patio. When I said to him, “Why are you building a patio?” he said, “Because it would make you happy.” To be fair, I've been divorced a while and the patio is still there so it’s that.
But it’s very… quite shiny, you see. And he's not underneath it, before you ask. But it’s his world.
And when Rosie asked me, “Do you want to take part in this event?” I kind of had a thought. I think and I thought, But what am I going to talk about? And I thought, I know what I'll do. I'll stand up in a roomful of people and tell them about the postnatal depression I had ten years ago, because I've never told anybody.
Ten years of academic teaching. Twice a year, every year, I do a session on postnatal depression. Nobody would have a clue. And it’s this idea that we never know really what’s going on underneath the surface, and this idea just of the science mimicking life and life mimicking science and it all being so intertwined, and the idea that if you speak to most academics they often really have a personal story underneath. It isn’t necessarily so personal as this that you end up in the research, but what led them there, what has become of them because of it, and the experiences that they have.
So not wanting to end it on such a miserable note as depression, obviously, things are fine now, honestly. I’m now doing lots of work around supporting women with postnatal depression. We’re doing a great project where we use creativity, poetry, creative writing to get women to actually talk about their experiences and get their voice out there and say, This is honestly how I feel. This is who I am. I don't need to hide it. And that in itself is going to be turned into research papers, which I'll present in the lectures. It seems to be sort of this ongoing cycle of life and science, and science and life, and motherhood And it continues to create itself. But whenever I meet a scientist now, I think, what got you here? What’s your personal story? And I think certainly tonight, I’m not the only one who’s going to tell you something like this. And thank you for letting me talk to you, really.