‘The scary moment I imagined my baby dying’: mum shares shocking reality of postnatal depression

Steph Schmidt is a warm, intelligent and engaging clinical psychologist, farmer, wife and mum who thought she was immune to postnatal depression. She was wrong.

Clinical psychologist and farmer Steph Schmidt with her young boys. Picture: supplied

There is one terrifying moment devoted mum-of-three Steph Schmidt, a trained clinical psychologist, will forever be haunted by.

Living on a remote farming property and utterly exhausted from a lack of sleep, she was bathing her firstborn son when the unthinkable crossed her mind.

“There was just this fleeting thought of ‘What if he slips under the water?’, just a feeling of ‘I would get some rest’,” she recalls.

“I look back and it is just such an incredibly scary thought to have. It was probably the toughest and scariest moment of my life.”

Soon after she was diagnosed with postnatal depression. Her eldest is now a “spirited” nine-year-old and a big brother to two little boys, aged six and three; his littlest sibling born on the side of the road en route to hospital in Clare.

The warm, intelligent and engaging 36-year-old, who farms with her husband Simon at Worlds End, near Burra, in the Mid North, is bravely speaking to the Sunday Mail with honesty and candour to raise awareness of postnatal depression – a reminder it can happen to anyone.

“If I, as a clinical psychologist, can experience mental health issues and experience postnatal depression, it shows, none of us are immune to it,” the rural mental health advocate who founded ACT for Ag said.

“I sometimes think I was the perfect parent before I had kids. I had really strong expectations of ‘gentle parenting’, ‘attachment parenting’ and all the things that were really important to me in how I wanted to be as a mum.

“For me, that added to my feeling of failing. You get stuck in this cycle of thinking ‘Well, everyone else can do it’.”

Simon and Step Schmidt with their three young sons. Picture: supplied

Steph Schmidt with the youngest of her three sons as a baby. Picture: supplied

Mrs Schmidt, who grew up in inner-suburban Prospect, said she didn’t immediately see the signs of her illness.

“The first couple of months were OK. It was that rhythm of ‘feed, sleep, change, repeat’,” she said.

“It was once (my baby) hit 14 weeks that things became more difficult. It just felt like no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get him to sleep. It would take me one to two hours to get him to sleep and then he would wake up 40 or 45 minutes later – day and night.

“Simon was working a lot on the farm, my parents were in Adelaide – I cycled down into postnatal depression.

“I was struggling to get anything done during the day. I felt like I would be just lying there and (my baby) would just crawl around me because he was busy and on the go.”

Encouraged by her worried husband and sister, she reached out to her local doctor, who prescribed antidepressants and arranged for the new mum to see a psychologist where she shared, among other things, the frightening bath incident.

“Being able to talk that through and realising actually that wasn’t just motherhood, that was the experience of post natal depression,” she said.

The arrival of baby No. 2 in 2017 coincided with the couple’s purchase of a second farming property just as drought struck, making it a highly stressful time.

“It was just a blur with a three-year-old and newborn. Still, I did what I had to do and we got through,” Mrs Schmidt said.

But post-natal depression raised its head again when her third son was born in 2020, during Covid-19.

“(It) was much earlier with (baby No.3). When he was around six weeks old, I went for a check-up with the GP and just burst into tears,” Mrs Schmidt said.

“(This time), it wasn’t so much the complete exhaustion and low mood, it was constantly being on edge. What I experienced this time round was a rage; I’d be this screaming, raging monster at my kids.

“Looking back, I was just doing so much. I was the South Australian AgriFutures Women’s Award winner in 2020, I had the two boys, a newborn, we had the farm.”

she said.

Mrs Schmidt was again prescribed antidepressants and sought support through her psychologist, also accessing peri-natal mental health phone counselling service, PANDA, and building “virtual villages”.

“The isolation out here can be incredibly tough,” she said.

“My closest mums’ group is Clare, which is 70km, and there are a lot of mums who live further out than me away.

“You can’t just pop the baby in the pram and walk to meet a friend for a coffee and be back within an hour.”

Steph Schmidt describes motherhood as both the best – and hardest – thing she has done. Picture: supplied

But, Mrs Schmidt says, she has learnt you don’t have to do it alone, despite where you live.

“There are supports and so many people who are feeling the same thing and that is where the virtual village comes in,” she said.

“This isn’t you failing, this isn’t you not being a good enough mum, or all the other things our mind tells us in that moment.

“For me, parenting is hands down the hardest thing I have ever done. I think we need to give ourselves permission to remember that it can be both the best thing, and hardest thing.

“For Simon and I, it has been such a journey, a combination of parenthood, running a farm business together, going through years of drought, but I say ‘I had a baby on the side of the road, you caught him, if we can do that we can do anything’.”