Rachel Louise Moran has written a magnificent, comprehensive, and long-overdue history of postpartum depression in the US called Blue (2024) that challenges the discursive and perhaps willful ignorance about the condition. In this historiography, she introduces the book through her own personal narrative and experience with postpartum depression. The narrative style of the book is a balance between personal histories of activists and postpartum psychiatrists with postpartum depression (PPD) and breakthroughs in postpartum scientific research and activism. Moran presents us with a rich archive of research conveying the history of different postpartum support groups and companies as well as the evolution of medicine to address postpartum depression and psychosis. The main thrust of her argument is that medicine and activism for postpartum depression and psychosis evolved together and are still at work. She goes as far as to argue that scientific research for postpartum depression and psychosis can be defined as feminist activism. The chapters tellingly proceed as follows: 1. Baby Blues and the Baby Boom; 2. A Feminist Postpartum; 3. Supermoms and Support Groups; 4. A Different Kind of Women’s Health Movement; 5. The Problem of Diagnosis; 6. The Postpartum Professional; 7. Talk Shows, Tell-Allas, and Postpartum Awareness; 8. A New Generation of Activism; 9. It is Not a Political Issue.
In Blue, Moran traces the discursive evolution of the condition of postpartum depression and psychosis. Some of the scholarly stakes of the book include: (1) Postpartum depression and psychosis are severe medical conditions that are severe and different from other clinical depressions. (2) Medicine is a form of activism. (3) Motherhood is a divisive topic even as it is often thought of as a white topic and Black and Latina women are more susceptible to PPD than white women. (4) Postpartum distress was not named until the 1960s even though evidence of postpartum psychosis dates back to 400 BCE.[1] Moran writes, as evidenced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) about the author’s own dealings with postpartum psychosis,
In the nineteenth century, a severe insanity following childbirth was called puerperal insanity, a cousin of modern postpartum psychosis. One of the most famous psychiatrists of the time, French reformer Jean-Étienne Esquirol, documented insanity in ninety-two women institutionalized in their first year postpartum. He described their outbursts, hallucinations, and nonstop talking and walking. A few other British doctors published on puerperal insanity in the first half of the nineteenth century. They debated whether the cause of the insanity was anemia, or perhaps ‘a peculiar irritation of the uterus.’[2]