A Serious Note on Post-Partum Depression

 Having joked obviously in my last post, I want to say that this is a real concern. Postpartum is an issue for a variety of reasons. I'm sure the fluctuation of hormones is a nightmare to deal with and it messes with the mind like crazy. What does not help, however, is the plethora of false views concerning children, life, unbiblical religious beliefs, etc. that now work in the woman with postpartum to cause her to think even for a moment that killing her children is desirable.

Andrea Yates is a good example of this. She murdered five of her children by drowning them in a bathtub and blamed it on postpartum. What you don't often hear is that she was also taught the false doctrine of the age of accountability and believed that if she killed her children they were all guaranteed to go to heaven, so yes, murder is bad, but if her children grow up and don't accept Christ in her baptist view then they would be eternally murdered. Such nonsense works on the fragile mind.

But it causes us to wonder if all of the feminist rhetoric of the past 100 years that has painted staying at home and having children as something that causes women to miss out on a better life, and to be degraded from humans to incubators, plays both a role in the depression itself as well as working with the depression to turn the woman against her very children. 

Intoxication tends to collapse inhibitions in areas toward which the person has temptations. If there are no temptations that would tempt someone to remove their children from their lives, one would have to wonder why any sort of emotional state would lead one to do it.

Now, of course, there are mental illness of delusion where one hallucinates, so this would not cover all mental illness.

At the end of the day, however, I would hope any one of our women would seek out help from us as elders if they are struggling as we would not seek to judge them over it but to help in whatever we can. That is what love looks like. No one should be embarrassed at asking for help. These struggles are real and these cultural deceptions are sinister.

But it should be noted that the Bible does not care why someone murders another person. It side-steps the mental illness issue because it views murderers as needing to be removed because of their threat to humanity. Hence, even an ox that gores must be removed, not because it is necessarily some homicidal force, but because anything that kills another human, and it is not an accident, must be removed from the created order.