Lesser-Known Postpartum Mood Disorders

Postpartum-Anxiety Anxiety: Anxiety that occurs when you think you may have postpartum anxiety after reading about it on an online message board you came across while struggling to breast-feed your colicky newborn at 3 A.M.

Insta-Mom Affective Disorder: Feelings of sadness associated with scrolling Instagram, compounded by the fact that the algorithm now knows that you’re a new mom and has started flooding your feed with videos of other new moms making it all look so easy, as well as ads for stuff you might not be able to afford but will buy anyway because you haven’t slept in months and your defenses are down.

Postpartum Amazon Amnesia: An impulse-control disorder that involves purchasing every single baby-related item on Amazon that any person or ad recommends, in an effort to help your baby sleep more or cry less, or sleep more and cry less, and then forgetting that you’ve purchased those items and accidentally buying them again.

Unspecified Hospital-Privatization disorder: Totally rational feelings of insanity that occur when the nurse leaves a screaming infant in your hospital room for you to care for—even though you had a C-section less than twenty-four hours ago and can barely sit up, let alone tend to anyone else—because the maternity ward has shuttered its nursery under the guise of a “baby-friendly initiative” that’s really just a ploy to cut costs now that the hospital has been privatized.

Postpawtum Dogpression: Melancholia associated with watching your once cherished geriatric Chihuahua be reduced to a shell of his former self after being dethroned by a human baby.

Postpundumb Dumbpression: Depression upon realizing that, thanks to your post-pregnancy brain fog, you’ve completely lost your edge, which manifests in your increasing reliance on mediocre puns.

Postparty Depreshy: A cutesy nickname for postpartum depression which your cool new mom friend has coined to minimize the severity of this very real, destabilizing disorder.

Your-Cool-New-Mom-Friend-Getting-Over-Her-Postparty-Depreshy Depression: When the cool new mom with whom you’ve commiserated for the past three months suddenly gets over her postpartum depression and so now you go on those sad, meandering walks (with your fussy infant strapped to your body) alone.

Pre-Weaning Depression: Depression associated with learning that “post-weaning depression” is a real thing (Google it!) and wondering how, after struggling for months just to breast-feed, it’s possible that you are expected to feel even worse after you stop.

Not-Getting-Paid-Leave Personality Disorder: It’s not the government’s fault for not mandating paid leave for new parents or providing a social safety net like every other developed nation in the world. It’s your fault for not working in finance like your sister!

Unspecified Postpartum Post-Roe Rage: Palpable rage associated with witnessing the G.O.P.’s war on reproductive autonomy through the lens of someone who wanted her pregnancy and wondering how anyone could vote for lawmakers who claim to be “pro-life” (but who don’t actually care about life because, if they did, they would support things like sex education, access to contraceptives, and science-backed policies that improve maternal-fetal health) and ranting about this to your male ob-gyn, who chalks it up to postpartum depression and offers you a prescription for Valium.

Post-Postpartum Depression: When you continue to experience depressive symptoms—which can mostly be attributed to living in a society that makes it nearly impossible for new moms (or pretty much anyone who’s not a billionaire) to thrive—long after being diagnosed with postpartum depression but you can no longer blame them on postpartum depression because it’s been, like, twelve years since you gave birth. ♦