Aug 19, 2026 · 42 min · 12 segments
When high-profile cases like Lindsay Clancy hit the news, public fear and sensationalism surrounding Postpartum Psychosis (PPP) spike—making clinical clarity and lived experience more vital than…
Ayesha AlviGuestAugustineHost
... coming to the issue of the symptoms, postpartum psychosis is, it's first of all very different from postpartum depression.
Right
Postpartum psychosis is always a psychiatric medical emergency that's considered life-threatening.
It occurs, sta- statistically, there's like one to two out of every thousand births.
Right
And another feature about postpartum psychosis is that it frequently tends to happen within, develop within the first two weeks postpartum.
It can happen later on, too, but most typically it's a very rapid onset kind of condition.
And so that's why I always think midwives and doulas are so uniquely positioned to be able to say, "Hey, there's something wrong.
Gosh, absolutely.
Mm-hmm.
So talking a little bit about the symptoms of postpartum psychosis, what makes it really different from postpartum depression is that only women with postpartum psychosis will have one of these two or both of these symptoms, hallucinations and, or delusions.
Gosh
... hallucinations, as you probably know, is seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling things that aren't actually out there, that nobody else can experience because there isn't actually anything new, no external stimuli out there, but the person is still perceiving this as happening.
And delusions are fixed beliefs that a person has that are not grounded in reality, and even though there's evidence to the contrary, the person is like convinced this is really happening and this is possible.
That must be so terrifying.
I, I can't tell you, there's nothing that I fear more than ever experiencing postpartum psychosis again.
It's like the worst thing that's, that ever happened to me, and in my situation, it was double time worse because I couldn't get help.
... coming to the issue of the symptoms, postpartum psychosis is, it's first of all very different from postpartum depression.
Right
Postpartum psychosis is always a psychiatric medical emergency that's considered life-threatening.
It occurs, sta- statistically, there's like one to two out of every thousand births.
Right
And another feature about postpartum psychosis is that it frequently tends to happen within, develop within the first two weeks postpartum.
It can happen later on, too, but most typically it's a very rapid onset kind of condition.
And so that's why I always think midwives and doulas are so uniquely positioned to be able to say, "Hey, there's something wrong.
Gosh, absolutely.
Mm-hmm.
So talking a little bit about the symptoms of postpartum psychosis, what makes it really different from postpartum depression is that only women with postpartum psychosis will have one of these two or both of these symptoms, hallucinations and, or delusions.
Gosh
... hallucinations, as you probably know, is seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling things that aren't actually out there, that nobody else can experience because there isn't actually anything new, no external stimuli out there, but the person is still perceiving this as happening.
And delusions are fixed beliefs that a person has that are not grounded in reality, and even though there's evidence to the contrary, the person is like convinced this is really happening and this is possible.
That must be so terrifying.
I, I can't tell you, there's nothing that I fear more than ever experiencing postpartum psychosis again.
It's like the worst thing that's, that ever happened to me, and in my situation, it was double time worse because I couldn't get help.
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