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Book Review
The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling With Depression, By Tracy Thompson, HarperCollins, 272 pp., $14.95
"The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression" is what the book business might call a slow burn.
It's a book about maternal depression whose virtues have been communicated not by bestseller lists, but by conversations between women friends, after one confides that she's had an unshakable sense of malaise since the baby was born.
When the book was published in hardcover last year, author Tracy Thompson didn't head out on any massive book tours.
She did some appearances close to her Virginia-area home and was interviewed on NPR. But the real response came over the Internet. Namely in the form of e-mail from other mothers who wrote, "It made all the difference to know I am not crazy and I'm not a bad mother and this is a real problem," Thompson said in a telephone interview last week.
"People don't want to talk about it unless they are dealing with it, then they are desperate to talk about it." Depression and parenting is still an issue most people consider "hush-hush," said Thompson, a former
She recovered, and wrote about the experience in "The Beast: A Journey Through Depression," published in 1995.
But starting a new chapter of her life - motherhood - brought new joys and overwhelming emotional challenges. While pregnant with her first daughter, Rebecca, Thompson's depression returned in full force, and wouldn't lift.
After giving birth she would often collapse in tears, exhausted by the demands of caring for a needy infant. Sometimes she was seized by fits of fury. Once, angry over a computer glitch and alone in the house, she nearly destroyed her own kitchen cabinets in a rage.
Depressed mothers are a gigantic sorority of suffering - 12 of the 19 million Americans affected by depression every year are women, the preponderance in the prime childbearing years of 25 to 44, Thompson writes.
"I'm not talking about a bad day, or even one of those bad patches every family goes through from time to time," she writes in "The Ghost in the House," now out in paperback. "Maternal depression is a Bad Day that comes for a visit and refuses to leave."
In her compelling mixture of memoir and research, Thompson deciphers an insidious form of women's mental illness directly related to trying to satisfy the needs of children, fueled by the perfectionist, nearly unattainable standards American society has set for modern mothers.
Her research includes detailed surveys from 400 other mothers diagnosed with major depression, many of whom described "monster mom"-style irritability, crying jags, isolation, emotional disconnection, numbness, exhaustion, and hopelessness.
Some describe laying in bed all day, others recall becoming obsessive about housework. Some were unable to enjoy a basic emotional connection with their offspring. One suffering woman, certain that her husband and infant son would be better off without her, swallowed 36 sleeping pills and awoke in a hospital.
Many mothers, Thompson found, were poorly served by conventional medical advice directing depressed women to stop taking their antidepressant medication while pregnant and breast-feeding. Relapse is almost inevitable, she writes, and the mental health of the mother and well-being of the child are put at risk.
The book includes a fascinating examination on the newest research in monkeys and rats, including a finding that babies of depressed moms experience "dysregulation" early in life - inconsolable crying, unusually high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and disorganized sleep patterns likely enhanced by a particular sensitivity to stress found in depressed families.
And while genetic predisposition to depression is quite possibly being passed down from mother to child, adequate coping skills are not, Thompson writes.
The science sections manage to not be too dense, thanks to frequent narrative interludes. Thompson examines the roots of her own illness - and finds a common thread going back generations and analyzes how her own daughter may have been affected.
Several years ago, Thompson's then-7-year-old daughter, Rebecca, was also diagnosed with depression. Reflecting on her pregnancy - fraught with job and family stress and followed by an ugly bout of post-partum depression, compounding her chronic mental illness - Thompson realized that all the jagged puzzle fragments of inherited mental illness were clicking into place.
"It is not coincidence I think, that Rebecca was born with a brain that seemed to have more hot wires than a stolen car," she wrote. "Did the spark ignite in my womb?"
Despite her difficult battle, Thompson manages to close the book on a hopeful note. The issue of maternal mental illness has been clouded by stigma for so long, many women are still uncomfortable talking about it with even their closest friends. But that need not be the case anymore. More help, and understanding, than ever is available for women and their children.
"The Ghost in the House" doesn't attempt to be the last word on this complicated illness, but is a welcome opening statement designed to get people talking.
Erica Noonan can be reached at enoonan@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
