Ms. Davis said many of those reaching out have mentioned the Clancy case. Some women were experiencing postpartum depression or other psychiatric symptoms when they contacted the help line, and many of their calls reflected high levels of anxiety and stress, she said.
“They’re having a really significant increase in fear and anxiety about what could happen,” she said, with patients wondering “could things get worse and worse?” Even more striking, Ms. Davis said, “we’re hearing from people who have already recovered and who feel that they were healed, they were done, they hadn’t had symptoms for years. With this acute awareness and misinformation and judgment in the news, mostly social media, they are feeling a return of symptoms, a return of fears.”
Dr. Julia Riddle, a reproductive psychiatrist at U.N.C. Chapel Hill’s Center for Women’s Mood Disorders, said current patients, as well as some who had children years ago, have been experiencing anxiety and fear. “They just think about what happened, that she actually hurt her kids, and now they are totally scared. They’re like ‘I know what it’s like to have scary thoughts. What if that happens to me again? What if then I actually act on it?’”
She said the patients who have felt especially anxious are those whose symptoms included fears that they might do things that put their children at risk, such as a worry “that they’re going to drop their baby down the stairs.” That can be a characteristic of postpartum O.C.D., she said, and in such cases “when you destabilize a little bit, you go back, so it’s like they can get kind of ill again,” Dr. Riddle said.
“We are seeing just an abundance of suffering and people being on high alert around their own symptoms, which to some degree is good, but also a lot of fear that they might be developing postpartum psychosis, and a lot of misinformation still around that confusing diagnosis,” Dr. Patterson said. “And so, while it could lead to some early detection, I think it’s also just escalating anxiety among patients who are already in a vulnerable place.”