I have taken babies from their mothers. After my son was born I feared it was my turn to be punished | Ariane Beeston

The first time I start hallucinating I am home, alone, with my baby. Drunk from lack of sleep I watch as his features morph in and out of shape. I take photo after photo, trying to capture what I see.

A few days later, while I am pushing the pram outside, it happens again. I pull the hood down to hide my baby from prying eyes. I no longer know who I can trust.

They say psychosis is a break from reality – and not long after my son was born mine broke, broke into a series of visions and delusions and the thought that I had already died.

I am dead, I am dead. And because I am dead it won’t matter if I take my own life. No one can miss what was never real.

Postpartum psychosis, which studies suggest affects between 0.86 and just over two in every 1,000 mothers, often begins in the first two weeks after birth. For me it was day four, when I found the nappy rash. I am certain that government welfare agencies will know. Somehow, they will know that I have failed already, that I am not a perfect mother, and they will come and remove him.

I know this because, before I became a mother, I worked with the New South Wales Department of Community Services at the child protection helpline, then as a frontline caseworker and finally as a registered psychologist.

I know this because I have taken babies from their mothers. I have strapped them into car seats in government cars, driven them back to the office where we’ve looked for last-minute foster placements and pulled together paperwork for the children’s court. I have assessed other mothers as part of my job. I have observed them during contact visits and made recommendations about parental responsibility.

And now it is my turn to be punished.

It is my turn to be judged.

Weeks after my son is born, I lie face down on the ground when someone knocks on the door, convinced that social workers are coming to take him. Outside I run from UV rays I believe are out to get us both. My limbs ache with fatigue and my skeleton feels sad. The bones holding me upright are fragile.

I need help and yet I keep not asking for it. I don’t ask for it because everyone around me seems to be coping with motherhood – and isn’t it supposed to be “the happiest time of your life”? I don’t ask for it because I am worried I will never work as a psychologist again. I don’t ask for it and I don’t ask for it and I don’t ask for it until I realise I have forgotten how to stay alive.

In hospital, on the mother and baby psychiatric ward, one of the nurses asks if she can film me interacting with Henry. It’s a standard part of a hospital stay, the manual notes. An opportunity to receive feedback on the developing bond between a mother and her baby.

“I know what you’re doing,” I think to myself as the nurse sets up the camera. I know that my parenting, my mothercraft skills, my ability to be “responsive” and “sensitive” is on display. For all the soft language used in the hospital manual, I know that I am under surveillance.

I put on my performance smile, perfected from years of training to be a dancer. I can perform motherhood on command. But I am a shell – and even after the hospital stay it takes me years to recover.

I still think about the babies we brought into care as young caseworkers. I think about the mothers whose babies were taken when they were three or four months postpartum, some even at birth, while still bleeding and reeling. I think about the hoops the department made them jump through, the way the words “failure to engage” were weaponised against them.

There is shame, there is guilt and there is disgust. How could it be that we didn’t understand that asking new mothers to meet what seemed like increasingly difficult expectations, while recovering from birth, adjusting to motherhood and facing numerous social challenges, was setting them up to fail? That having their child taken would only make their existing mental health challenges worse.

I often think about a woman I met alongside me in the mother baby unit who was experiencing what we call “intrusive thoughts” of harming her newborn. Studies have found that between 70% and 100% of new mothers report unwanted, intrusive thoughts of infant-related harm, with as many as half of all new mothers reporting unwanted, intrusive thoughts of harming their infant on purpose – although this is not associated with an actual increased risk of harm to babies. I think about the email I received from the other mother months after we were discharged, saying that the department had called her in for a meeting. She was asking me for advice. How many children are removed because we don’t understand the nature of these thoughts in the perinatal context? How many mothers are punished for reaching out?

As young caseworkers we were always “at capacity”, always struggling with “competing demands”. This meant we often intervened at crisis points instead of working with families to keep them together. I can write here that we did our best in a broken, racist system. I sometimes even believe it’s true when I reflect on my own complicity. But it wasn’t OK then and reports today suggest not much has changed.

Too unwell to work as a psychologist, I left my role in the department not long after my second hospital admission when my son was 15 months old. But the work has never left me – and what I learned as a vulnerable mother, a mother on the nursery floor at the MBU on the other side of the camera, has changed the course of my life and career.

In my role now at Centre of Perinatal Excellence – Cope – we often hear of women too scared to ask for help for common conditions such perinatal anxiety and depression for fear of having their child removed, let alone more complex mental illness such as postpartum psychosis or perinatal OCD.