INVOLUNTARILY detained at a psychiatric hospital just 48 hours after the birth of her son, Corrine Maslin was living in a personal hell.
The Kalamunda mother was suffering from a rare event that affects just one in 1000 women after childbirth.
This is her story.
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READ NOW“At 27 I fell pregnant for the first time and I was truly happy to be pregnant,” she said.
“It was a normal pregnancy until close to my due date when I started having problems sleeping which I dismissed as a symptom of pregnancy.
“A week before my due date doctors induced me because of high blood pressure and after an exhausting 28 hours I gave birth to a healthy boy weighing 4kg.
“Completely drained my husband left the hospital to let me sleep. Truth is I didn’t sleep. I could not sleep. I had so many thoughts rushing through my head.”
After a day and night of no sleep, doctors and nurses became concerned.
“I started to do things a mother wouldn’t normally do,” she said.
“I pushed the crib away from me. I became reckless. It was at this point I knew something was wrong.”
A resident psychiatrist sent the new mum to Graylands for an intensive medical assessment.
“I suddenly went from being in a swish private hospital in Subiaco to a locked ward at Graylands without my son,” she said.
“I thought I had killed him.”
Ms Maslin fell deeper into psychosis and became delusional believing she had to pass a series of tests in order to escape Graylands.
“I felt like a wild animal running around trying to find a way to escape,” she said.
“I went to the big door in the common room and patted around the edges trying to find the secret exit button. In my mind, this was the way out of the locked ward. It was the most confusing night of my life and unsurprisingly I still did not sleep.”
In the morning a psychiatrist recommended Ms Maslin be transferred to the mother baby unit at Graylands.
“Nothing can describe the happiness I felt when I realised I had not hurt my son,” she said.
“But in my eyes I was fine and did not need to be hospitalised. However there were radical changes in my personality and a non-existent sense of reality.”
Two more days of manic behaviour followed and while in a deep psychotic state the doctor sat Ms Maslin down and delivered her diagnosis.
Post-natal Manic Psychosis. A severe, rare and little-understood condition that can cause a loss of reality, delusions and hallucinations. Left untreated or misdiagnosed it can prove fatal to mother and baby.
Over the next three weeks Ms Maslin slept for just one hour a night.
“The doctors and nurses were worried I was falling deeper into a delusional state,” she said.
“They tried to have me on the ward with my son so I could bond with him but I was too unwell. I was transferred back to a secure locked ward.”
With more sleep, slowly the new mum started to emerge from her haze of manic psychosis.
“Four hours, six hours and then eight hours until doctors moved me back to the mother baby unit,” she said.
“Once again I was reunited with my son but I felt like a failure. I was heartbroken and ashamed and too frightened to hold him.”
Ms Maslin spent four months in the mother baby unit and with constant reassurance realised she was a good mother with a mental illness and medication and therapy was the only way to help control her bipolar disorder.
“It’s now been 13 years since the birth of my child,” she said.
“I have been well for 10 years and my son is my pride and joy. We have a close emotional bond and I love him unconditionally.”
In 2006 after another stay in hospital, Corrine was introduced to the Even Keel Bipolar Disorder Support Association. She is now the CEO or the organisation.