Postpartum Quotations

'The Big Girls' has always seemed to me to be a story about different kinds of families - a divorced mother with a child; a father with his child and his girlfriend; a mother of three children, suffering from postpartum depression; and the rigid artificial families maintained by women in prison - all potentially perilous.

Do I wish I had never endured postpartum depression? Absolutely. But to deny the experience is to deny who I am.

We used to think the rate of postpartum depression was 9 percent. We now know it is much higher than that.

Most of these women are returning to work anywhere from six to 12 weeks after giving birth. There isn't a lot of research out there on women's general postpartum health, and almost nothing specifically looking at working women.

One of the problems with postpartum depression is that women usually aren't diagnosed until the disease is already established. If a woman's health care provider knew early on that a patient was slipping down this slope, he or she could intervene. It may not take much to screen for it, either - the questions in the fatigue test that we used took about two to three minutes to answer.

Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression

It was ultimately fatigue that best predicted which women would develop postpartum depression.