I love my children with a fierceness that hurts. My oldest just graduated high school, and my momma heart hardly knows how to wrap itself around the fact that my babies are leaving our nest. There is nothing in the world except my connection with God that brings me more deep joy than being a mom.

But just yesterday, I saw a man pushing a stroller and I got a sort of heavy, anxious feeling in my chest. I turned to my husband and asked, “How did we do it? How did we do that early stage of having three little children?” Being a mom of littles was hard for me!

Although I didn’t struggle with the kind of postpartum depression that leads to thoughts of harming a baby, the OCD that had almost left me as a single young adult came back with a fury the minute I found out I was pregnant, and I dealt with serious postpartum depression with at least my first baby. And anxiety? That was my constant companion from the time I was a child. Having to also care for children of my own only exacerbated that struggle.

So when I saw this Mormon Message (see below) about a young mom who dealt with serious postpartum anxiety, depression, and OCD, my heart went out to her and I knew I wanted to post about it.

In the Church, we talk a lot about how much motherhood matters to God. Now that I’ve been doing this motherhood thing for nearly two decades, I understand more why it is that God commands us to multiply and replenish. Family matters. Motherhood matters in ways that I think our mortal selves can’t really comprehend. It’s not just for the joy that can be there, but for the challenge of it all that stretches us to the point of recognizing all the more how much we need God.

Because family life can be really, really hard. Motherhood can be knock-you-to-your knees hard. Like the woman in this video, I had spent time in the professional world before I found my husband and became a mom. I’d served a foreign mission. I’d traveled the world meeting with executives and helping them work through complex operational and organizational challenges.

But nothing, nothing could have prepared me for how hard motherhood would be. And I was embarrassed by that. As this Mormon woman says, my world was turned upside-down when I became a mother.

If you are a mom and finding yourself shocked by the challenge of motherhood, know you are not alone. Like this woman says in the Mormon Channel video, don’t hesitate to accept offers for or ask for help.

I wonder if in our busy modern lives, we’ve lost some of the power of Relief Society when it comes to helping women who are moms. I know as a mom of teenagers I wish I had more formal ways to engage the women in my ward about launching children into adulthood and parenting adult children. We need each other!

I know that when I was a young mom, I needed a lot of encouragement. I am glad I had a few friends I could call, and I’m grateful for the visiting teachers who stepped in to help. But I really didn’t know it was okay to struggle with motherhood. All I knew is that I knew my weakness as a mom and wondered if my kids deserved better.

Now I know that those weren’t thoughts from God. Now I know that motherhood is a process. Now I really know that the Atonement is for parents (oh, how grateful I am that Jesus Christ is there to cover and compensate and comfort us in our mortal weakness as parents!).

And now I know that one of the ways to access the power of the Savior’s grace is to learn to work with my body and its weakness. Anxiety, OCD, depression — these are real things. They affect the brain, which is both a physical organ and a spiritual center in our lives. Like Rachel in this video, I struggled for years not being able to feel the power of the Atonement in ways that people often talk about it. Peace isn’t something you feel regularly when anxiety presses on you. Trained therapists can help us separate out the thoughts that come with anxiety so that we can create more space for peace to enter in and have better eyes to see tender mercies that extend beyond just what we can (or can’t) feel.

Again, if you struggle as a mom, don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you struggle with anxiety, depression, OCD or other mental health issues, please share with someone. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, including professional help. The pieces can and do come together as we seek for help. And God’s grace often shows up in ways that we might not expect.

The post Mormon women and postpartum depression and anxiety appeared first on Women in The Church of Jesus Christ.

~by Michelle

After gathering many responses to the recent question from one of our readers, I thought it would be useful to address one of the topics that came up in some of the comments: depression (and/or the use of anti-depressants by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).

It”s not an uncommon topic to be brought up — why, if Mormonism claims to have a “plan of happiness” are some Mormons taking anti-depressants?

While I understand the knee-jerk response to some studies that show that Utah has a high rate of anti-depressant use, to use such data to conclude that Mormonism is harmful seems to miss several relevant points.

1. Many people who live in Utah are not Mormon; thus statistics coming from Utah should not automatically be assumed to be statistics about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In reality, most Mormons live outside of Utah. And there are other states that have a higher-than-average percentage of LDS people in their populations (states in which anti-depressant use is not, relatively, as high).

2. Part of the way active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints live includes not partaking of alcohol, drugs, or tobacco — substances that are often used by people to deal with stress, pain, struggle.

3. Mental illness is something recognized as just that — an illness. Often there isn’t an external cause. Some people are predisposed to depression. That’s not to say that external events or triggers can’t make things worse, but there are simply too many factors that come into play with mental illness to make declarative statements about Mormonism from one set of data.

4. On that note, one researcher* [Daniel K Judd] who has studied the topic of mental health extensively has discussed how prescription use in general (much for well recognized health issues such as diabetes or heart problems) is higher in Utah, which could correlate to perhaps more medical coverage, more education about health issues, or any number of other things…the point, again, being that there are other factors and data to consider before making any conclusions. (Interestingly, this researcher has data that would indicate that religious people may have better mental health than their non-religious counterparts.)

5. As to what it means to be Mormon and be dealing with depression or other mental illness: Faith is not something that automatically removes the trials of life. We don’t claim as Mormons to not have trials. In fact, once you get to know any Mormon well, you will surely find that he or she has plenty of problems. And our problems are really no different from anyone else’s. We have health issues, physical and mental. We have family struggles. We have job and financial stresses. We have hard things happen. People sometimes have hard things happen as members of the Church (someone is unkind or does something wrong…like recent news stories about people who were defrauded by fellow Church members). Again, we don’t claim to live pain-free lives, and we definitely don’t claim to be perfect, or that Church members don’t sometimes make bad choices.

But we do claim to have beliefs that, when understood and lived, can help us face trials in life, and give peace and perspective in the midst of adversity.

I liked this quote from Alexander B. Morrison, who is a former member of what is called the Quorum of the Seventy (a leadership group in the Church). His daughter has struggled with depression, and he’s even written a book on the topic of mental health in the context of faith.

In the Book of Mormon we read that the Nephites, who had been obedient to God’s laws, “lived after the manner of happiness” (2 Ne. 5:27). What a wonderful and insightful thought: if we are obedient and follow God’s commandments, we will be happy.

It is important to understand, however, that happiness does not imply the absence of adversity. Every individual experiences temptation, opposition, and trials that test faith and endurance: “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Ne. 2:11). (From the article Myths about Mental Illness — a recommended read)

I think it’s important to acknowledge that not all Mormons are happy all the time, and some struggle a lot. Some of this includes struggles with mental health. But that doesn’t take away from the reality that for many (if not most) Mormons, our faith can help us find the strength and courage and hope to keep on keeping on through the hard times…and to even try to learn from them.

We believe we are here in this life to be tested, that the struggles in life have a purpose, and that this life is not all there is. As we look to Christ and lean on God in hope, we seek to come to know ourselves and God better through our trials, and trust that God will help us through them. We also believe that through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, God can change us, little by little, and help us so that we can better face difficulties with courage and patience.

Happiness does not depend on what happens outside of you but on what happens inside of you; it is measured by the spirit with which you meet the problems of life. -Harold B. Lee

This is a process, to be sure, and it can be extremely difficult, and that happiness is not necessarily something we feel constantly. But it is something that is real, even for many of us who deal personally with the reality of mental illness.

———-

*Daniel K Judd, “Religion, Mental Health, and the Latter-day Saints (see also this article: Why High Anti-depressant use in Utah)

For more information and thoughts on this topic see the following:

Personal story about facing clinical depression: Battling Clinical Depression, “Finding the Light from Within”

More information, research, and responses about the topic of Mormons and anti-depressant use, see this article and this Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry on mental illness. For one study that showed that LDS women are actually less depressed than non-LDS women, see this USA Today article. (Note that the Encyclopedia of Mormonism article states that Mormon women run about average with the population at large, and Mormon men suffer with less depression than the average.) 

For more information on LDS views about mental illness, see here.

For LDS resources in dealing with different types of mental/emotional struggles see here or here. For an indexed list of articles on the topics related to mental and emotional illness (and other topics as well), see this resource list.

This post was edited from the original.

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