She had just brought life into the world. And the world responded by asking her why she wasn’t happy.
Neha Sisodia
We live in an era of unprecedented contradiction. Women are celebrated as CEOs, entrepreneurs, and creators. They juggle Zoom calls and newborns, spreadsheets and sleep deprivation, with a smile that the algorithm demands. And when that smile cracks—when the exhaustion becomes unbearable, when the joy that was promised never arrives—we have perfected the art of not noticing.
Postpartum depression affects one in seven women worldwide. In India, the prevalence climbs to between 11 and 23 per cent. Yet between 50 and 80 per cent of these women never receive a diagnosis. They simply suffer in silence, their struggle repackaged as maternal love, sacrifice, or the expected burden of motherhood. In 2026, with all our medical sophistication and digital connectivity, we have somehow managed to make maternal mental health more invisible than ever.
The work-from-home revolution, heralded as a solution for working mothers, has become a particular trap. A woman sits at her desk at 9 AM, attends a leadership meeting at 10 AM, and breastfeeds her infant at 11 AM. The boundary between productivity and motherhood has dissolved entirely. There is no commute to separate these worlds. There is no office door to close. There is only an endless, suffocating blend of expectations that society insists she can—and therefore must—manage simultaneously.
The Biology They Didn’t Mention InTheMaternity Leave Policy
Let’s begin with what science has unequivocally established: during pregnancy, estrogen and progesterone levels reach heights unprecedented in a woman’s lifecycle. Within 24 to 48 hours of delivery, they crash. This isn’t poetic language. This is a hormonal withdrawal more severe than withdrawal from most substances we actually treat with concern in healthcare. It’s equivalent to throwing a light switch in a woman’s neurochemistry and watching everything go dark.
The HPA axis—the system that regulates stress response—becomes dysregulated. Oxytocin, the hormone that should facilitate bonding, frequently malfunctions. A woman’s brain is in genuine crisis while her culture insists she has never been happier.
Now ask yourself this: if a man experienced this biochemical collapse, would we tell him to “snap out of it”? Would we suggest he simply needs to be more grateful? Would we blame his character? The answer is no. We would rush him to treatment. The fact that we don’t do the same for women exposes a healthcare system built on centuries of dismissing female suffering as hysteria or weakness.
The Trap Of “Doing It All”
The modern working mother faces a particular cruelty: she is told she can “have it all,” which really means she is expected to do it all. The infant needs her. Her employer needs her. Her spouse is, statistically, doing considerably less childcare and household labour. And she has internalised the message that any struggle with this impossible equation is a personal failure, not a systemic one.
Work-from-home arrangements amplified this trap. Without the commute, there is no transition time. Without the office, there is no social support network. The isolation is profound. A mother debugging code while her toddler cries in the next room is not having “flexibility.” She is experiencing fragmentation. Her attention is constantly divided, never fully present anywhere, always failing somewhere.
Add to this the cultural context, particularly acute in India, where a new mother’s worth is measured by her productivity—both her economic contribution and her reproductive success. If she bore a daughter rather than a son, her depression would be compounded by the weight of a society that devalues her achievement. If she works, she is selfish. If she doesn’t, she has wasted her potential. There is no acceptable position.
The research is clear: social determinants are the strongest predictors of postpartum depression. Lack of support, marital dissatisfaction, childcare stress, and life stress all loom larger than biology alone. In other words, PPD is not primarily a disease of defective women. It is a symptom of defective structures.
Why Women Don’t Speak
A mother with postpartum depression faces a terrifying choice: seek help and risk being labelled unstable, potentially losing custody, inviting family disappointment, and confirming her worst fear that she is failing at the one role society has told her matters most. Or stay silent and endure.
Few choose to speak.
Routine postpartum psychiatric screening doesn’t exist in most Indian hospitals. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale—a ten-question tool that takes five minutes—remains inconsistently used. Nobody is actively checking in on the mother’s mind. The entire machinery of maternal healthcare is designed around the baby. The mother is assumed to be a conduit, not a person requiring care.
ASHA workers are trained to track infant immunisations but not maternal depression. Public health campaigns celebrate breastfeeding but say nothing about the mother’s neurochemistry. We ask if the baby is healthy. We rarely ask if the mother is surviving. And “surviving” is the operative word—PPD is associated with significantly elevated suicide risk, which remains among the leading causes of maternal death postpartum, though this is vastly underreported in low-income settings.
The Argument Nobody Can Ignore
For those unmoved by a mother’s suffering—and that indictment speaks volumes about our values—consider the child. Infants of depressed mothers show lower rates of secure attachment, poorer cognitive development, and greater behavioural problems later in life. Maternal responsiveness, the ability to read and respond to a child’s cues, is impaired in PPD, disrupting the neurological architecture of the developing brain.
If we will not treat a woman’s depression for her own sake, perhaps we should treat it because her suffering damages the next generation. If that is the argument that finally compels action, let us use it. But acknowledge what its necessity reveals: how little value we assign to women’s wellbeing independent of their reproductive function.
The Solution Exists. The Will Doesn’t.
Antidepressants work. Cognitive behavioural therapy works. Interpersonal therapy works. Peer support groups and community health worker programs work. In 2019, the FDA approved brexanolone—the first drug specifically designed to treat PPD—formally recognising that this condition deserves dedicated research and treatment.
Science exists. The solutions are available. What we lack is the structural commitment to implement them.
From a public health standpoint, this requires: mandatory postpartum mental health screening in all hospitals, integration of maternal mental health into national maternal health policies, training of ASHA workers and community health volunteers to identify and refer cases, public awareness campaigns that normalise discussion of PPD, and workplace policies that protect mothers’ mental health alongside their physical recovery.
It requires recognising that work-from-home flexibility is not a gift if it erases the boundary between work and motherhood. It requires paid parental leave that is actually paid and actually taken by both parents. It requires healthcare systems that see women as complete human beings, not incubators.
The Feminist Question We Must Ask
Why is there no mandatory postpartum mental health follow-up in India’s national maternal health policy? Why do we fund campaigns about infant nutrition but not maternal mental health? Why do we celebrate women in the workforce while systematically failing to support their basic well-being after childbirth?
The answer is uncomfortable: acknowledging PPD fully would require acknowledging that motherhood, as currently constructed, can destroy a woman. It would require holding families, healthcare systems, employers, and governments accountable. It would require valuing women’s minds as much as we value their reproductive capacity.
The silence around postpartum depression is not accidental. It is structural. It serves the interests of a system that demands women’s labour—emotional, reproductive, and economic—while refusing to provide adequate support.
A Question Worth Asking
We cannot build a just, developed society on the silence of its mothers. In an age where we celebrate remote work’s flexibility, we must ask: flexible for whom? A woman debugging code at midnight while her postpartum-depressed mother cries in another room is not experiencing progress. She is experiencing the fracturing of her own humanity.
Every year, we normalise this as “the cost of having it all,” and we lose mothers to suicide. We lose children to the neurodevelopmental consequences of maternal depression. We lose the full potential of women whose minds and spirits have been fractured by a system that never asked if they were okay.
Communication shapes awareness. Awareness shapes help-seeking. Help saves lives.
So, the question I leave you with, dear reader, is this: What will it take for us to finally ask mothers, genuinely and without judgment, “How are you?”—and actually listen to the answer?
“They called her hormonal. They called her dramatic. They called her ungrateful. The diagnosis they never called her was: deserving of care. Tell me—how many more mothers must suffer in silence before we decide that her mind matters too?”
ne*************@***il.com