Post-natal PTSD: 'I relived childbirth over and over again'

A woman left with PTSD after the birth of her daughter says she relived the trauma "over and over again" as she cared for her newborn.

Anna Simpson described the emergency C-section as the most frightening experience of her life.

A study has suggested up to 28,000 women a year in the UK could be affected by maternal post-traumatic stress disorder.

NHS England said it was "improving mental health support for new mums".

Ms Simpson, 34, from Wakefield in West Yorkshire, was rushed to an operating theatre with her unborn daughter Macie in the breech position, after two unsuccessful attempts to move the baby in the womb.

"There were a lot of people around me," she said.

"There was an anaesthetist trying to put a cannula in my hand so I felt like it was being attacked, it felt very frightening, I was very scared."

Experts warn that PTSD - commonly associated with soldiers returning from war - is harder to treat the longer it goes undiagnosed.

Anna Simpson says the therapy she went through has helped her recover

A traumatic birth can involve unexpected events including the baby's heart rate dropping significantly, an emergency caesarean section and the mother losing several pints of blood after haemorrhaging.

Mothers have a post-natal appointment about six weeks after the baby's birth to assess recovery and check for post-natal depression, but PTSD is not routinely looked for.

Ms Simpson, whose daughter is now 16 months old, said: "I was going through the birth over and over again, it was exhausting and really painful.

"It was physically draining, all that on top of having to look after a new baby was really difficult."

Months after the birth, she noticed her emotions were not fading so tried cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) followed by a successful programme of eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR).

EMDR works on the theory that traumatic memories have not been properly processed by the brain, but can be reprocessed correctly via therapy involving eye movement, aural and physical prompts.

Research from academics at City, University of London, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, suggested 3-4% of women report PTSD in pregnancy and after birth.

Using this percentage, they calculated 28,000 women could be affected in the UK each year.

Prof Susan Ayers, who co-authored the study, said: "We need to raise awareness of birth trauma and PTSD both in the general public but also in professionals that come in contact with women.

"We need to train healthcare professional in terms of identifying [affected] women and we also need to have clear, effective evidence-based treatments."

Ms Simpson was rushed to an operating theatre with her unborn
daughter Macie in the breech position

Dr Rebecca Moore, from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said many women who experienced PTSD were being "failed by the current provision".

"Many women who have had a traumatic birth in the UK are not diagnosed, misdiagnosed or cannot access rapid, specialist, trauma-specific treatment," she added.

Kim Thomas, from the Birth Trauma Association, said: "We have had women come to us who have had their traumatic birth experience 20 or 30 years ago and they are still experiencing the symptoms.

"If you don't get treatment then your symptoms can go on for years and years."

Ms Simpson suggested the therapy she went through had helped her recover.

"I just don't feel fragile anymore, the emotion that was bubbling under the surface all the time has gone and I can talk about it," she said.

"It's so nice for me because really it was a lovely thing for me to have a baby, it is so nice to be able to talk about it now."

In a statement, NHS England said: "Any form of mental ill-health during pregnancy, labour or early parenthood is of real concern, but great strides have been made in improving mental health support for new mums with 7,000 more women receiving treatment last year.

"In addition, specialist mental health services will be available in every single part of England by April next year and the long-term plan for the NHS will set out further improvements in care."

Common signs of PTSD and birth trauma

• Vivid flashbacks
• Intrusive thoughts and images
• Nightmares
• Intense distress and real or symbolic reminders of the trauma
• Physical sensations such as pain, sweating, nausea or trembling

Source: Mind

(Source: BBC)

The extraordinary life and death of the world’s oldest known spider

This is the story of the oldest known spider in the world and the people who knew her. The details are compiled largely from research conducted by Barbara Main and Leanda Mason, who knew her best over nearly half a century.

She was born beneath an acacia tree in one of the few patches of wilderness left in the southwest Australian wheat belt, in an underground burrow lined with her mother’s perfect silk.

Her mother had used the same silk, strong and thick, to seal the burrow’s entrance against the withering heat of the summer of 1974, and against all the flying, prodding things that prowled the North Bungulla Reserve.

She lived like that, in safety and darkness, for the first six months of her life. Then one day in the rainy autumn months, her mother unsealed the tunnel, and she left.

It’s likely that two or three dozen spiderlings left the burrow with her, and that nearly all of them soon died.

A female Gaius villosus Rainbow. (Courtesy of Leanda Mason)

The 250-acre North Bungulla Reserve was surrounded completely by farmland and roads, abutting an abandoned gravel pit. Space was scarce under the leaves' protective shade, and competition was fierce. Most of the spider’s siblings would be eaten by birds or lizards or cannibalized by each other, or would bake to death in the sun.

But she was fortunate. She found an unoccupied patch of earth a few feet from her mother’s burrow and began to dig.

She dug an almost perfect circle straight down into the soil, just large enough to fit her body, a small fraction of an inch across. Then she lined the tunnel with silk, as her mother had lined the one in which she hatched.

For as long as she lived, this would be her only home.

She wove a silken door across the burrow's mouth, attached on one side to make a hinge. She dragged hundreds of twigs to the edge of the doorway, one by one, so that they radiated out like fan blades.

Then she went inside, closed the door and waited, likely days or even weeks, for her first real meal.

She was essentially blind but attuned to every vibration in the earth, so when she finally felt something move along the twigs — an ant or small beetle, maybe — she leaped out and pulled it in.

In this way, she caught food when it came to her, and hid from the outside when there was nothing to eat. Scientists called her Gaius villosus — one of dozens of trapdoor spider species that lived in the vanishing wilderness of the Australian wheat belt.

Courtesy of Leanda Mason

After a year in her burrow, in 1975, she would have felt strange, heavy vibrations on the twigs outside her door. This often meant a predator was trampling around or a large forager like a kangaroo.

This time, though, the vibrations were caused by Barbara York Main, who was standing directly over the burrow.

Main had grown up in the wheat belt, she would tell the Australian Broadcasting Corp. years later. Throughout the 20th century, farming and industrialization had destroyed almost all the wilderness in the region — leaving patches like the North Bungulla Reserve as precious sanctuaries for the tiny species that held her fascination.

“I felt an immediate affinity with small things,” Main told the ABC. “I didn’t have that one-on-one relationship with a kangaroo that I could with caterpillars.”

Now she was a zoologist with the University of Western Australia. On that day in 1975, she knelt over the burrow, parted the twigs behind the spider's door and fixed a small metal sign into the soil.

It was engraved, "16.” A few feet away, Main had marked another burrow "1,” and deduced that 1 was 16's likely mother. And 24 and 30 were her likely sisters.

Main spent hours beneath the acacia tree, marking every burrow she could find. She was building a family tree of Gaius villosus, whose hold on the earth seemed so fragile and about which humans knew so little.

“It is also hoped ultimately to assemble complete case histories of several individual nests,” Main told the International Congress of Arachnology in her first report in 1977, according to her written paper. “A life-cycle of perhaps twenty years notwithstanding.”

But 20 years was just a guess. Among other things, she would later tell the ABC, “I wanted to know how long the spiders lived.”

The next years were hard for the spiders. A long, dry summer in 1977 wiped out a third of one year's generation, Main wrote. Hungry quail scratched open nests. A scorpion even invaded one burrow.

Still, 16 survived and grew larger, expanding her burrow every year, until it was as wide as a dime, then a quarter, and larger still.

Gaius villosus was a resilient species, Main wrote when she published her first major paper on the project, in the Bulletin of the British Arachnological Society in 1978. “Although adult nests frequently have their doors and twig-lines torn off (presumably by birds) none appear to have been seriously affected by this. The spiders reattach their doors, sometimes upside down or back-to-front and attach new twig-lines.”

She had tagged and mapped 101 villosus burrows by then, all within a few meters of each other, near the edge of the old gravel pit.

Main was impressed by how long the spiders seemed to live. Based on her estimates from their tunnel diameters and sporadic observations she had made before the study, she believed two matriarchs were at least 16 years old.

“They might be 18 or 20!” she added.

Main mentioned spider 16 only in passing in this early paper. She was only 4 years old and nothing special, yet.

One day toward the end of the 1970s, spider 16 made a rare excursion to her front yard. She wove a sort of welcome mat outside her door — a net laced with pheromones, which Main would compare to a tea doily.

Then she went back down and closed the door — waiting this time not for the skittering of prey, but for the knock of a male caller.

Main wrote in her paper about the very different lives of male and female villosus spiders. The males left their burrows as soon as they were sexually mature — around age 6 or so — to go search for doilies and knock on doors.

The males never return to their burrows after mating, Main wrote. They wandered until they died, and all died young.

The female, however, went straight back to her burrow after sex. She sealed the door up extra tight with a finely contoured plug, crafted so precisely that it could seal out heat and rainwater, and spent the next year locked inside her home, to lay her eggs and shelter them.

The next autumn, she unsealed the burrow and sent her children off into the world, to live or die as they could.

These matriarchs were the secret to villosus spider’s success in such an arid environment, Main noted. In their deep bunkers, they could survive droughts and fires on the surface. They could mate every few years, and continually replenish the spider population.

But even Main did not guess how much 16 would overachieve.

She spun, fed, spun and fed, and probably produced many generations of young in between many hardships. A swarm of grasshoppers ravaged the reserve in 1991, according to a paper in Pacific Conservation Biology. An invasive plant species began to spread from the gravel pit. “Biodiversity is being reduced,” the paper said.

Over the decades, spider 16’s mother, siblings and countless cousins and children died. But her family tree kept growing, and each time 16's burrow was checked, the webbing and swirl of twigs looked immaculate as ever.

In 2013, an Australian Broadcasting Corp. reporter named Vicki Laurie became intrigued by reports that an 84-year-old zoologist had been cataloguing a family of spiders for 40 straight years.

So Laurie traveled with Main, out to an “an unremarkable bit of scrub” in the wheat belt, and watched her work.

“We spend three hours on our knees as Barbara checks each burrow to see if it’s occupied or not,” Laurie reported. “She observes, with a mild air of concern, how few new trapdoor burrows there are and how unseasonably dry the reserve is.”

When they reached the plaque of spider 16, Laurie was skeptical that it had really been occupied by the same spider for the last four decades. But Main explained that females never left their burrows until they died, and no other spider ever moved in.

Main flipped open the door with a small knife, and through Laurie, 16 was introduced to the world.

“Inside, I can just see the spider, which has pulled a veil of silk lining half across its burrow,” Laurie recalled in her report. “Under my breath, I introduce myself and wish her well.”

It was around this time that an undergraduate student, Leanda Mason, began to accompany Main on her excursions to the reserve.

To Mason, who was studying to be an ecologist, the reserve looked like an Eden in the blight of industrialized southwest Australia — teeming with species that might not be around much longer.

By now, Main had catalogued hundreds of spiders. Generation after generation. But on each excursion, Mason told The Washington Post, they would beeline directly to 16's door, to visit the spider that never seemed to die.

This became a tradition. On 16's 40th birthday, Mason said, she asked if she could give the spider a mealworm.

“Barbara wouldn’t let me,” she said. “It interfered with the study.”

Main's plan of cataloguing a family of spiders having succeeded far beyond her expectations, and she began to look forward to the project's end.

“She was going to finish the study when number 16 died,” Mason said. “She was going to write it up as a big thing.”

Instead, she said, Main’s health declined before the spider’s.

The zoologist retired last year, in her late 80s, and Mason, now studying for her doctorate in ecology at Curtin University, took over the spider study.

On Oct. 31, 2016, she went out to the reserve with a drone, hoping to get a bird’s-eye view of how this small rectangle of bushland was holding up against the roads and fields.

Courtesy of Leanda Mason

But like her mentor before her, she went straight to 16 first.

When she arrived at the clearing that day, she noticed that the twigs around the door had lost their meticulous spiral fan shape. They lay scattered in disarray.

Mason looked at the silk door, and saw a tiny hole in the center, as if something had pierced it.

She lifted the door and lowered an endoscope into the burrow, and confirmed what she already suspected. The spider was gone.

A parasitic wasp had likely broken through the seal, and laid its eggs in 16's body.

“She was cut down in her prime,” Mason said. “It took a while to sink in, to be honest.”

On April 19, Mason, Main and Grant Wardell-Johnson co-published a paper in Pacific Conservation Biology, announcing the death of spider 16 at age 43.

She was the oldest spider known to have existed, Mason wrote, eclipsing the previous record set by a 28-year-old tarantula.

“We can be inspired by an ancient mygalomorph spider and the rich biodiversity she embodied,” she wrote, beside a photo of a perfect hole beneath a tree — nearly half a century of work: Main's, hers and the spider's.

(Source: WP)

Meghan Markle’s Birth Plans Are Breaking Royal Tradition

Meghan Markle hasn’t been a traditional royal, and her rule-breaker tendencies will continue as she plans for the birth of her first child with Prince Harry.

It’s only been a year since Meghan announced her engagement to Prince Harry, but she apparently “has had enough of the pressure on her to adhere to tired conventions,” according to Grazia (via Life and Style). This time, however, she isn’t just ditching pantyhose or wearing an off the shoulder neckline. The Duchess of Sussex wants to have a home birth.

© Chris Jackson/Getty Images

“She is a huge advocate of home births, but British royals are expected to give birth at the Lindo Wing of St. Mary’s Hospital in London,” an anonymous source claimed. “Meghan doesn’t want what she calls a ‘medicalized’ birth, and instead wants to have a pool set up in a relaxing environment. Even Harry found this surprising, but Megs wants to ensure her birth is as natural as possible.”

The Lindo Wing has been the birth place of many recent royals. Princess Diana gave birth to Harry and Prince William there. Princess Anne birthed Peter and Zara Phillips at the London hospital, and Kate Middleton did the same for Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. Even non-royals, like Meghan and Harry’s friends George and Amal Clooney, have chosen the highly-respected maternity ward.

It’s surprising that Meghan reportedly doesn’t want to go to the hospital, but expect a large team of professionals to be nearby if she does give birth at home. The risk for complications is higher for a pregnant woman over age 35. The Duchess of Sussex is 37.

The insider also claims that the “Suits” alum has big plans for after the royal baby is born. She allegedly wants to breastfeed in public to help fight the stigma against it and wants to make sure Prince Harry is photographed holding the child.

(Source: MSN)

The mistake I made with my grieving friend

The author of We Need to Talk, Celeste Headlee, reveals how she learned to help — and not help — a friend with loss.

A good friend of mine lost her dad some years back. I found her sitting alone on a bench outside our workplace, not moving, just staring at the horizon. She was absolutely distraught and I didn’t know what to say to her. It’s so easy to say the wrong thing to someone who is grieving and vulnerable. So, I started talking about how I grew up without a father. I told her that my dad had drowned in a submarine when I was only 9 months old and I’d always mourned his loss, even though I’d never known him. I just wanted her to realize that she wasn’t alone, that I’d been through something similar and could understand how she felt.

 But after I related this story, my friend looked at me and snapped, “Okay, Celeste, you win. You never had a dad, and I at least got to spend 30 years with mine. You had it worse. I guess I shouldn’t be so upset that my dad just died.”

 I was stunned and mortified. My immediate reaction was to plead my case. “No, no, no,” I said, “that’s not what I’m saying at all. I just meant that I know how you feel.” And she answered, “No, Celeste, you don’t. You have no idea how I feel.”

 She walked away and I stood there helplessly, watching her go and feeling like a jerk. I had totally failed my friend. I had wanted to comfort her, and instead, I’d made her feel worse. At that point, I still felt she misunderstood me. I thought she was in a fragile state and had lashed out at me unfairly when I was only trying to help.

PHOTO: SIMONE GOLOB/GETTY IMAGES

 But the truth is, she didn’t misunderstand me at all. She understood what was happening perhaps better than I did. When she began to share her raw emotions, I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say, so I defaulted to a subject with which I was comfortable: myself.

 I may have been trying to empathize, at least on a conscious level, but what I really did was draw focus away from her anguish and turn the attention to me. She wanted to talk to me about her father, to tell me about the kind of man he was, so I could fully appreciate the magnitude of her loss. Instead, I asked her to stop for a moment and listen to my story about my dad’s tragic death.

 From that day forward, I started to notice how often I responded to stories of loss and struggle with stories of my own experiences. My son would tell me about clashing with a kid in Boy Scouts, and I would talk about a girl I fell out with in college. When a co-worker got laid off, I told her about how much I struggled to find a job after I had been laid off years earlier. But when I began to pay a little more attention to how people responded to my attempts to empathize, I realized the effect of sharing my experiences was never as I intended. What all of these people needed was for me to hear them and acknowledge what they were going through. Instead, I forced them to listen to me and acknowledge me.

 Sociologist Charles Derber describes this tendency to insert oneself into a conversation as “conversational narcissism.” It’s the desire to take over a conversation, to do most of the talking and to turn the focus of the exchange to yourself. It is often subtle and unconscious. Derber writes that conversational narcissism “is the key manifestation of the dominant attention-getting psychology in America. It occurs in informal conversations among friends, family and co-workers. The profusion of popular literature about listening and the etiquette of managing those who talk constantly about themselves suggests its pervasiveness in everyday life.” Derber describes two kinds of responses in conversations: a shift response and a support response. The first shifts attention back to yourself, and the second supports the other person’s comment. Here is a simple illustration:

 Shift Response
 Mary: I’m so busy right now.
 Tim: Me too. I’m totally overwhelmed.

 Support Response
 Mary: I’m so busy right now.
 Tim: Why? What do you have to get done?

 Here’s another example:

 Shift Response
 Karen: I need new shoes.
 Mark: Me too. These things are falling apart.

 Support Response
 Karen: I need new shoes.
 Mark: Oh yeah? What kind are you thinking about?

 Shift responses are a hallmark of conversational narcissism. They help you turn the focus constantly back to yourself. But a support response encourages the other person to continue their story. These days, I try to be more aware of my instinct to share stories and talk about myself. I try to ask questions that encourage the other person to continue. I’ve also made a conscious effort to listen more and talk less.

 Recently, I had a long conversation with a friend of mine who was going through a divorce. We spent almost 40 minutes on the phone, and I barely said a word. At the end of our call, she said, “Thank you for your advice. You’ve really helped me work some things out.” The truth is, I hadn’t actually offered any advice; most of what I said was a version of “That sounds tough. I’m sorry this is happening to you.” She didn’t need advice or stories from me. She just needed to be heard.

(Source: HuffPo)

Hindus don’t Rest-in-Peace (RIP)

It has become fashionable nowadays to say or type RIP whenever we hear of someone’s death. This is particularly so in the social media circuit. Like we have imported and adopted so many western customs so also have we adopted this practice without pausing to think of the deep religious connotations this term has.

“Rest in peace” (Latin: Requiescat in pace) is a short epitaph wishing eternal rest and peace to someone who has died. The expression typically appears on headstones, often abbreviated as “RIP” or “R.I.P. It derives its origins from the deep Abrahamic tradition of “Judgement Day” when the departed soul would unite with its body and the dead would rise and Jesus/God would sit in judgement and each “Man must give account of himself on the day of judgement” (Matthew 12:36; Romans 14:10,12) and shall be “judged by how he measured up to the word of God.” The sinners would be cast into hell fire and suffer eternal damnation and the good shall obtain salvation.

The Hindu tradition of Karma on the other hand does not consider anyone to be a sinner and postulates that each person is impelled by his or her karma and the play of gunas to behave in a particular way. The Hindu belief as laid out in the Sanatana Dharma clearly states that the soul never dies:

na jaayate’ mriyate’ vaa kadaachin naayam bhuthva bhavithaa na bhooyah: |
ajo nithyah saasvato’yam puraano na hanyate’ hanyamaane’ sareere’ ||

“Never is he (Soul) born, nor does he die at any time,
he has never been brought into being, nor shall come hereafter;
unborn, eternal, permanent and ancient (primeval).
When the body is slain, he is not slain.”

The soul sojourns through various bodies in its quest to attain liberation (moksha):

vaasaamsi jeernaani yathaa vihaaya navaani gr.hnaathi naro’ paraani |
thathaa sareeraani vihaaya jeernany-anyaani samyaathi navaani de’hi ||

“As a man casts off worn-out garments and puts on new ones,
so the embodied soul casts off the worn-out body and enters other new ones.”

The Hindu belief that the soul undergoes multiple births to help it “work-out” its karma through a gradual, graded, and continual process of refinement is completely contrary to the belief in Eternal damnation, Judgement day etc.

Why can’t Hindus simply say: “My/Our Condolences” or “Om Shanthi” (which by the way is again for the family members grieving at the loss, the soul knows no loss)?

It is time Hindus moved from darkness to light…

Asatho Maa Sad Gamaya.
Thamaso Maa Jyothir Gamaya.
Mrithyur Maa Amritham Gamaya.
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.
From untruth lead us to Truth.
From darkness lead us to Light.
From death lead us to Immortality.
Om Peace, Peace, Peace.
– Brhadaranyaka Upanishad

(Source: Ramesh Venkataraman)