I just read the EmpowHer news story about Gwyneth Paltrow's recent interview where she says that her postpartum depression was staved off when she started eating healthy, doing acupuncture, and getting in touch with her spirituality.

I send many kudos Gwyneth's way for recognizing that she had PPD and was able to find techniques that helped.

At the same time, I want to offer a word of caution that sometimes PPD is so severe that no amount of vegies, prayers or needles will make an impact.

So my son comes home from Jr. High yesterday saying that he's scared because some kids at school threatened to "jump" him. Me, the naive mom, had to ask what "jump him" meant, and now that I know, I'm steaming mad. Like how dare these kids threaten to beat up my son who already has so much to overcome every single day?? If he were in a wheelchair, he'd be confronted with compassion, but since he has INVISIBLE disabilities, Asperger's Syndrome and Tourette's Syndrome, he's confronted with hostility.

I've heard of more and more people trying online therapy, but I've never tried it myself. I came upon a site called Tranquil Counseling that specializes in postpartum depression counseling. And it's done online through e-mail and live one-on-one chats. That would be amazingly convenient for new moms. Imagine laying your baby down for a nap and then going into the next room for a PPD therapy session.

I was recently contacted by a high school student named Ashley clear across the country who asked if she could interview me for a high school project. She had chosen to write about Postpartum Depression with the hopes of educating others on how devastating and misunderstood it is. Ashley found me when she came upon this blog and I was so thrilled and honored to help her out. Below are her questions to me and my responses during the interview.

What was your initial reaction to finding out you had Postpartum Depression, how did it impact your life?

I continue to be amazed at the backlash that has generated in response to the much-needed, ground-breaking Mother's Act that is currently before the US Senate. Apparently just a handful of women are behind this backlash, however they're raising quite a stink. And they appear not to have actually read the bill. Rather, they obviously have their own agenda regarding SSRI's and thus have twisted the actual intent of the bill to fuel their agenda.

There's an extremely comprehensive article on PPD on the Scientific American web site, including data from a number of current PPD-related studies from around the world. The article, written by Katja Gaschler, includes an in-depth look at the impact of PPD on the nascent bond between a mother and her baby. (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=mise...) Here's an excerpt: ---------------------

Andrea Yates' case was an especially gripping one for me personally because of the timing of it. I gave birth to my fourth baby on June 18, 2001 (see my beautiful baby in the photo to the right giving me a big smooch). She was born just two days before Andrea Yates killed her five children. Having barely survived PPD with my third baby, and knowing well the grim statistics of having it reoccur, I was slightly nervous, to put it mildly, that I would experience it again. Being bombarded with the Yates’ case on the news shortly after giving birth didn’t help my nerves to say the least…

So I read in the paper this morning that J.Lo just gave birth to twins yesterday and next to the article was a photo of her (obviously taken before her pregnancy), with the caption stating that she's already starting to get back into shape. P-LEEEAASE....

An article out of Sacramento ran today about Kristina Fuelling, a new mother who allegedly drowned her 8-day-old daughter, Faith. Her stunned friends and older sister were quoted in the story, telling about how blissful Kristina was while she was pregnant -- the picture of a glowing new mom, relishing the experience of baby clothes shopping and choosing the perfect name for her daughter.

When I suffered from postpartum depression, I kept insisting that I wasn't depressed. My vision of a depressed woman consisted of lots of weeping, general moping around, hand-wringing, etc. Not a woman who was overcome by nausea a hundred times worse than any morning sickness and vomiting violently when not on the toilet with diarrhea. I was a gastrointestinal specialist's fantasy. And after I was sent to a G.I.