Blogger on a mission

Others turn to medication or therapy to help them through postpartum depression or related disorders. Katherine Stone turned to the keyboard.

Four years ago, Stone started blogging about postpartum issues. Each time she wrote, she considered it another exercise in self-help.

That exercise, as it turns out, catapulted her into an advocacy career: her blog, Postpartum Progress, generates nearly 3,000 hits a week.

“Nothing in my background had anything to do with women’s health or mental health, so I certainly wasn’t prepared for how my life and perspective would change once I went through postpartum OCD,” she said. “The only thing that contributed to my interest in the subject was having gone through it myself.”

Stone, 39, who lives in the Atlanta area with her husband and two young children, said she first experienced postpartum obsessive-compulsive disorder—a mood disorder in which a woman tends to focus her obsessive thoughts on her baby—in 2001. “I had no idea what was wrong with me and was completely devastated.

“It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. I felt alone, ashamed, and confused. Once I recovered I felt like it was incumbent upon me to help other women by making sure they knew they weren’t alone and that they shouldn’t be ashamed.”

Stone said it’s important for those who’ve experienced a postpartum mood disorder to speak up “so that women will feel it’s OK to reach out.”

“I wrote an essay about my experience with postpartum OCD that ended up appearing in Newsweek in June 2004. The responses that I saw about my essay a couple of weeks later in Newsweek’s letters to the editor section inspired me to do more.”

(This article was first published in Esperanza magazine in its spring 2009 issue)