My Baby Didn’t Break Me...Sertraline Did

When I first became pregnant with my son in 2023, I was extremely nervous. This was my first child, as well as the first baby born to anyone on either side of my husband and I’s families in over 30 years. I didn’t know what to expect, and as a naturally neurotic over-thinker, it didn’t take long until my worries started to get the best of me. I would like awake at night, worrying about the baby, worrying about the birth, worrying about everything. By my second trimester, I was a nervous wreck. It didn’t help that, due to major food aversion – not uncommon in pregnancy – I had almost entirely stopped eating. I was losing weight at 5 months pregnant, and that alone was enough to make my husband and midwife worried. Now, I would like to be very clear; I do not blame my midwife for what followed. She saw a pale, frightened, anemic woman with an already enormous baby-bump, crying in her office while her husband begged for solutions. My midwife did what she had been trained to do…she sent me to my family doctor with a mission: get screened for Prenatal Depression and Anxiety, and ask for medication. 48 hours later, my husband and I were headed home with a shiny new prescription for 50 mg/daily of Sertraline (Zoloft).

At first, the pills really seemed to help. I stopped crying myself to sleep at night. The nightmares about ghoulish doctors with scalpels eventually receded. My appetite never really returned, but I could at least force myself to eat on my husband’s urging. In the process of losing my anxieties about pregnancy though, I also lost something else. Actually, I lost many things. As a former creative writer and pianist, I lived most of my young adult life with a vivid world of stories and music in my head. After starting Sertraline, all of that gradually faded away into a bland inner landscape of meaningless daily routines. I stopped listening to music. I stopped reading fiction. I even stopped dreaming altogether (which for someone who used to be able to lucid-dream at will, was a pretty big shift).

Unfortunately, a lot of my fears came true. The birth of my son was traumatic; an emergency C-section, followed by him (and my husband) being whisked away to a NICU (poor kiddo was born with a heart defect) across the city, leaving me alone in a featureless maternity ward. Then, my son needed major surgery, and there was no time to process what had just happened to us. I broke pretty much every rule of C-section recovery in those early days, because my son needed us more than I needed rest. By the time my husband and I finally brought our baby home, after nearly a month in the hospital, our little family was thoroughly shell-shocked. Even after that, my son, being a cardiac baby, needed A LOT of follow-up appointments, monitoring, and specialist visits. There was no time to be sad, shocked, grieving, or traumatized. Those early months as a family of three were a blur of doctors’ offices. People often told me that I was ‘coping soooo well’, especially given my own terrible experience with the birth. To be honest, I don’t know if I was even coping at all. Between the chaos and the antidepressants, I existed purely on autopilot.

Then, at 12 months postpartum, I had a very serious, life-threatening health emergency. A uterine hemorrhage nearly ended my life on a frozen December evening, and what followed was a series of painful and frightening surgeries. Not great, for an already traumatized new mom. By 1.5 years postpartum, I was honestly a human wreckage. My physical health was in shambles. I had my hands full with a little boy who – against all odds – was absolutely thriving, and thus full of energy and opinions. My mental health was never being given any chances to rest, take stock, and recover. At this point, after almost 2 years of near constant chaos, immense gynecological suffering, and all the while 50-100mg of sertraline running as a daily ‘white noise’ in the background, I was fried. The medication that was supposed to keep me stable and comfortable was preventing me from ever actually dealing with the root of the problems. And let’s not lie to ourselves, I had had a LOT of problems since getting pregnant. But, at 1.5 years postpartum, I was no closer to unpacking it all and sorting through the experiences of the pregnancy, birth, and postpartum year that I was when I swallowed that first pill.

And there were consequences for using antidepressants to blunt these very real, very human experiences and emotions. As mentioned, I no longer listened to music or read books. I no longer had – or even wanted – friends. I didn’t watch movies anymore (not even my beloved comfort movies, ‘The Lord of the Rings’!), and I certainly didn’t write or play piano. Even when my son napped or my in-laws came over to babysit, I didn’t want to do anything for myself. I just…existed. And it went beyond that. My husband has told me that, in the 2.5 years total that I was on Sertraline, it was like I “didn’t really register or react to anything”. He has described my affect throughout the third trimester of pregnancy and the 1.5 years postpartum as “unmotivated, uninterested, just coasting through life without any spark of living”.

Eventually, I got sick of feeling like a ghost in my own life. I had made a couple, brief attempts to taper myself off the Sertraline over the 1.5 years postpartum, but every time had ended in failure. Without fail, as soon as I stopped taking the pills or got my dose down too low, my mind would ‘snap’. I would have explosive meltdowns, swinging between crying uncontrollably, intense panic over hypothetical situations, and fiery anger over minor inconveniences. It was terrible for my husband, having to live in the same house as someone so emotionally unstable. Every time I would mention this to my doctor, he would tell me that it clearly meant my Depression and Anxiety still required medication. But the thing is, the initial trigger that set all of this in motion – pregnancy - was no longer a factor. I was a shell of a human after the birth and my traumatic hemorrhage, yes, but I also needed to face that pain…that suffering, unpack it, and put it to bed as part of my history. The longer I stayed blunted and numb on the antidepressants, the deeper these events were being allowed to bury, unchecked, into my psyche. And my doctor seemed totally uninterested in helping me move past any of it.

So, finally, my husband and I made The Decision. We flushed all of my antidepressants down the toilet (not good practice, but hey, I needed a dramatic manifesto statement). The months that followed were best described as Dante’s Inferno. Quitting cold-turkey certainly got the job done, but it also kick-started an absolute onslaught of what I now know to be Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome. I’ve cried hysterically, exploded in rage, trembled with panic, and smiled at my son…sometimes all within the same day. I feel like, in the 2.5 years since I took that first pill, I have lost so much of what used to be my internal infrastructure for coping with daily life. Things that never would have rattled me before are now enough to send me into a tailspin of worries and misery for hours. My temper is shorter than I would have ever believed possible. Things that are totally outside of my control reduce me to tears and catastrophizing. I have daily fatigue, sleep is rarely satisfying, I feel constantly overheated, my appetite and digestion are a disaster (IBS-C, anyone?), and I still have moments where I think “Who am I? I don’t even recognize myself anymore??”

BUT…the old Me is starting to show herself again, in tiny flashes and flickers, like a familiar face in a lucid dream. I made a music playlist on my phone, and actually listened to some of it. I read half of a book, and almost believe myself when I say I intend to finish it. I built a successful fire in our backyard firepit – it’s Canadian spring, everything is still cold and wet! – and proudly bragged about it to my husband. I then proceeded to sob hysterically about nothing a couple hours later, but hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Even just writing this story out feels like a small triumph; it’s the first piece of actual creative writing that I’ve done in almost 3 years. My mind still feels fractured…uncomfortable…raw. There are days when I still don’t know if I’ll ever be the same again. But then my husband reminds me that I WON’T ever be the same…because I’m a mother now. And now that I’m not numbing my life behind a haze of SSRIs, maybe I can start learning who the real ‘New Me’ actually is.