A Free 53-Page Guide for Mothers and Their Partners
The Postpartum Depression Hope Guide collects what this site has learned into one book you can download, keep, and hand to someone else. There is no email required, no sign-up, and no cost. It is a direct download.
Who It Is For
There are two readers in mind throughout.
One is a woman trying to work out what is happening to her, who may not recognize herself in a symptom list and is not sure whether what she feels counts as a problem.
The other is whoever is watching her and does not know what to do — a partner, a mother, a friend, a sister. Sections written specifically for that second reader appear throughout the book rather than being pushed to the end, because the person who notices first is usually not the person who is ill.
What Is Inside
- Crisis numbers on page two, so nobody has to read a book to find them.
- What it actually feels like — the descriptions women use, rather than the clinical list they do not recognize themselves in.
- Baby blues or something more, with the day-by-day timing that tells them apart.
- How long this lasts, including what a three-year study of 4,866 mothers actually found.
- The conditions — depression, anxiety, intrusive thoughts and OCD, rage, birth trauma and PTSD, and postpartum psychosis, including what the news coverage gets wrong about it.
- What helps — treatment, therapy, medication, feeding and sleep, and how to pay for any of it.
- A part written to partners, with words to actually say, including what to do when she will not get help.
- Two screening questionnaires, the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, reproduced in full with what the scores mean.
- What to bring to the appointment, and the questions worth asking.
What It Will Not Do
It will not diagnose you. No book can, and neither can a questionnaire — the screening tools at the back are a way of turning something hard to describe into a number you can hand to a clinician, which is a different and more useful thing.
It will not pretend the evidence is stronger than it is. Where something is genuinely unknown, the guide says so rather than filling the gap with a figure that sounds authoritative. Where a widely repeated statistic turns out to be a misreading, it says that too.
Every figure in it is drawn from published research, and the sources are listed at the back.
Share It
The guide is free to download, print and pass on. If you work in an OB practice, a pediatric office, a doula practice or a support group, you are welcome to print copies or send the link to anyone who needs it.
If you are having thoughts of harming yourself or your baby, call or text 988. The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is also available around the clock at 1-833-852-6262, by call, text or chat, in English and Spanish. See crisis help and hotlines.
