My wife DIDN'T KNOW WHOI WAS

Lee Smith was terrified when his soulmate developed psychosis after giving birth

As my wife paced up and down the room, with cuts on her arms and muttering to herself, I watched in terror. All of a sudden, she tried to pull the  sink off the wall, screaming that she wanted to ‘wake up from this nightmare’. Just three days before, we’d been a normal, happy family. But since the birth of our second daughter Freya a few days earlier at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, Jess, 34, had barely slept. She’d also been saying the strangest things – that she’d died in childbirth and that the people around her weren’t real. She was in hospital and in the grip of postpartum psychosis (PP), a mental health condition affecting one in 1,000 new mothers*. Back home, alone with Freya and her big sister Lola, then four, I sat and sobbed. It was the worst night of my life.

Jess and I had met in 2012, while we were working in a residential care home near our hometown of Washington, Tyne and Wear. She was kind and caring, and it was easy to fall in love with her. We married in August 2015 and within months, Jess was pregnant – we couldn’t wait to be parents.

 Lockdown stress