Late last year, Katherine Stone learned that her blog -- Postpartum Progress -- had made Babble’s Top 100 list among North America’s most influential mothers in social media.
It was a heady moment for the Cumming mother of two, but she didn’t think much of the news initially.
“Then the day the list came out, there was my picture next to famous bloggers Ree Drummond and Heather Armstrong,” she said. “I literally fell out of my chair.”
Out of more than 3.9 million mom bloggers in the U.S., Stone ranked in the Top 10 at No. 6. She linked to the news on Facebook and wrote “hell hath frozen over.”
“To me, it’s kind of crazy, but at the same time thrilling because one would hope a lot more people will learn about postpartum depression,” Stone said.
Catherine Connors, Babble’s director of community, credited Stone’s "gift for writing about a difficult subject in a warm and engaging way" for the high ranking.
“Her blog has saved women's lives,” Connors said.
According to the Mental Health America of Georgia website, perinatal mood disorders like postpartum depression are the most common complication of childbirth.
In the United States, between 15 and 20 percent of new mothers suffer from these devastating illnesses which, if not properly treated, can have a long-term negative impact on the health of entire families, said Shoshana Bennett, a clinical psychologist and author of Postpartum Depression for Dummies.
In Georgia alone, more than 25,000 pregnant and postpartum women are likely to experience a perinatal mood disorder.
Although women with a history of depression or mental health are at higher risk of suffering from postpartum, no one is immune, Bennett said.
“Everybody needs to be screened,” she said. “This is not a women’s issue. It’s a public health issue and when left untreated it can be devastating, leading to the neglect of the kids and even suicide."
‘I'm not a good mother'
Stone was diagnosed with postpartum obsessive compulsive disorder shortly after her son Jackson was born on Sept. 8, 2001.
She’d had a calm peaceful pregnancy, but within days of giving birth she was hysterical, excessively worried about her son and convinced she was a terrible mother.
By week seven, murderous thoughts slipped in and out of her mind like a thief in the night: smother him with the burp cloth.
“It’s very hard to explain, but unless you’ve had it happen to you, it's hard to imagine that your brain can think a thought that you didn’t purposely think,” Stone said.
At first she tried dismissing the thoughts, but they kept repeating themselves.
“I was horrified,” she recalled. “I thought I’d gone crazy because it was the only explanation I could come up with.”
But she didn’t dare tell her husband about the thoughts she was having. To explain her mood swings, she simply said something was wrong – with her.
What do you mean, her husband asked.
"I’m not a good mother,” she told him. “I can’t do this.”
Dealing with the disorder
Eventually Stone was so miserable she had no other choice but to seek help.
On maternity leave from Coca-Cola where she worked as a director of experiential marketing, Stone decided to contact the agency’s employee assistance service.
“I just had a baby and I’ve gone crazy,” she told the woman on the other end of the phone.
Stone believed her confession would be the end of her, that the first therapist she saw would report her to the police.
Instead, the therapist told her she was having intrusive thoughts. “That’s when I found out I had postpartum OCD,” Stone said. “It was the first time I realized it wasn’t me. It was an illness and it could be fixed.”
It was also the moment, Stone said, she realized she wasn’t alone, and that she needed to give the help she’d wished for all those weeks.
At the time, Stone said she had no idea what form that help would take.
“I had a job and I had a baby so I put it to the back of my mind,” she said.
The idea refused, however, to be ignored and finally near the end of 2003, Stone resigned from her job at Coke.
One day, still unsure what to do, she wrote an essay on postpartum depression and submitted it to Newsweek.
"I Was Scared That I Might Hurt My Baby" was published in June 2004 and a few weeks later the letters poured in thanking her.
One of them, in particular, held Stone’s attention. A woman named Carol Blocker wrote that her daughter Melanie Blocker Stokes had jumped off the roof of a hotel and killed herself because of severe postpartum depression. She wished her daughter had seen Stone’s essay.
“That’s when I knew I had to do something,” Stone said.
In July 2004, she launched Postpartum Progress to raise awareness about the ailment and provide peer support to those suffering from it.
“I don’t want it to seem like I had this grandmaster plan. I didn’t,” Stone said. “It was more like I’m going to start talking and I hope it will help somebody.”
The blog – postpartumprogress.com – gets several thousand hits a day. In addition to support, women can find a long list of resources, including support groups, doctors and top treatment centers such at Emory’s Women’s Mental Health Program, where Stone found the help she needed.
Stone attributes the personal nature of her site -- her posted email address is available for anyone to reach her -- for most of the blog's success.
“I get hundreds of emails from all over the world each day,” she said.
And yet, she hardly feels that is enough. Indeed, most days, Stone, who had a second child in 2005, said she feels like former University of Georgia tailback Knowshon Moreno, who’d drop the ball and go back to the huddle after every touchdown.
“I’m honored to have been named one of the Top 10 mom bloggers in the country, but the reality is not every mom is online,” Stone said. “In fact, research shows that a higher percentage of women get postpartum who are in poverty, low socioeconomic areas. What about them?”
Her answer: go back to the huddle; create a nonprofit, postpartumprogress.org.
“I already knew how to write, to blog, but creating a nonprofit was very scary for me, but I really felt like, this was my purpose,” she said.
By creating the nonprofit, Stone said she hopes “to change how women with the disorder are treated, how the community at large look at us and change how the health community treats us."
“We do so much to focus on early child development and maternal health and everyone leaves mental health out of it," she said. "I want to reach out to everybody, raise awareness and change policy.”
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