The Postpartum Psychosis Prophecies (with Ayana Lage)

After experiencing a devastating miscarriage, writer Ayana Lage was thrilled to welcome a new child. She wasn't so thrilled with the accompanying  sleeplessness, mania, and hallucinations, which included the delusion that God was speaking directly to her. Ayana was experiencing postpartum psychosis, a rare but potentially life-threatening maternal mental health emergency.

In this deeply personal conversation, Ayana joins Blair Hodges to discuss her memoir, Missing Me: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis and the Long Road Back. She describes what psychosis actually felt like from the inside, including the strange exhilaration of mania, terrifying hallucinations, hospitalization, and the difficulty of learning to trust her own mind again.

We also explore depression and self-harm, religious trauma and faith deconstruction, the stigma surrounding severe mental illness, why postpartum psychosis is so often misunderstood through sensational stories of infanticide, and Ayana’s difficult decision to have another child.

It’s a conversation about what happens when reality itself becomes unreliable, and how a life can be rebuilt afterward.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org. 

Show Notes

• Ayana Lage, "Postpartum Psychosis Landed Me in a Psychiatric Ward for 17 Days. Now, I’m Ready to Share My Story," Cosmopolitan.

Fellow Traveler Episodes

• The Bad Dads Who Helped Invent Modern Motherhood (with Nancy Reddy)

About the Guest

Ayana Lage is author of Missing Me: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis and the Long Road Back. Her writing has appeared in places like The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and more. She has a B.S. in journalism from the University of Florida. When she’s not working, you’ll find her exploring her hometown of Tampa, Florida, with her husband and two children.