‘The Words were Like a Charnel House’: Towards a Body of Postpartum Psychosis Life Writing

Postpartum psychosis (PP) is a psychiatric emergency developing shortly after childbirth. Its symptoms oscillate between insomnia, mania, delusions, and audiovisual hallucinations. Among other intrusive cognitions, PP can produce distressing beliefs that one’s baby has died, or that the person experiencing PP is dead themselves. Despite a low risk of infanticide, owing to certain historical thought-worlds, PP retains a stigmatising association with death. Its very nature challenges autobiographical frameworks of articulation, so life writing about PP spans a wide gamut—from less formalised online narratives like Naomi Knoles’s, to Catherine Cho’s memoir Inferno (2020), and Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary Witches (2024). These texts speak to both the limitations and indispensability of life writing which brings birth/birthing into contact with death across three different registers—actual, delusional, and metaphorical—in the context of maternal mental health. For Alice Flaherty, writing illuminated the shadowy recesses between birth and death, body and thought after her twin sons died at birth, creating a textual ‘charnel house’ to their memory (2015). This essay reaches for the edges of life in PP autobiography to curate the beginnings of a ‘charnel house’ to similar strands in this life writing, which may otherwise elude critical literary attention.