Dreaming of Sushi: The Depths of Postnatal Depression and Dave the Diver

“I’m ordering sushi to the labour ward.”

A collective moan echoes around the community hall, where seven other pregnant women are perched uncomfortably on plastic chairs.

“Yes, and blue cheese!”
“And rare steak!”
“And a glass of wine!”

We are attending our final antenatal class, and we’re feeling quietly optimistic about the upcoming births of our babies. We’ve toured the maternity centre, practiced our hypnobirthing techniques, and had our final ultrasounds. We’re collectively imagining ourselves beaming, in bed, holding our bundles of joy – post-delivery, awaiting a Deliveroo.

A month later, we meet again. Pale and drawn, clinging to soft, squalling infants, who nearly killed us or nearly died. In hushed voices, we feel our way towards a shared acknowledgment of the pain, the shock, the disappointment, the guilt, the anxiety, the anger, the betrayal.

And yes, we love the baby, and yes, we’re lucky to have access to modern medicine, and yes, the stitches are healing, and yes, this pillow helps with haemorrhoids, and that cream soothes blistering nipples…but beyond swear words and tears, there is something left unsaid. We can’t articulate the terrifying entanglement of birth and death.

When I eventually get around to unpacking my ‘birth bag’, I laugh at the fact I’d shoved my Switch into one of the pockets. “Maybe I’ll do a few runs of Hades between contractions to pass the time”, I’d thought. Ha.

Another month passes. Some of us are struggling to breastfeed, others are in and out of A&E with bleeds and fevers and panic attacks. Some are being persecuted by overbearing in-laws, others have no family support at all. We’re all so sleep deprived. I’ve been googling ‘narcolepsy’ a lot.

Even though I can sit up and walk around again, leaving the house is still a daunting task. I’d love to be able to freerun around a digital city in Assassin’s Creed or mark the passage of time in Animal Crossing, but my daughter only sleeps when she is being held. As a result, I have lost the use of my hands – I can’t game because I physically cannot hold a controller and a baby at the same time.

In the Mums’ Whatsapp chat, someone brings up the topic of mental health. She’s been seeing a counsellor to process the trauma of giving birth. We share some links to NHS definitions of ‘baby blues’ and postnatal depression – the former being a ‘normal’ response to the extreme hormonal changes that follow birth, and the latter being a disorder characterised by a persistent low mood, irritability, anxiety, memory loss, and the feeling that you cannot cope. 1 in 10 mothers in the UK are diagnosed with postnatal depression, but I suspect the number of mothers who experience it is much higher.

Neither diagnosis comes close to capturing the shifts and shadows shaping my matrescent brain. There’s the misery that sometimes accompanies milk let down, triggered by a sudden surge of lactation hormones. The intrusive thoughts about all the awful ways my baby’s tiny, perfect body could be crushed, shattered, lost. The disintegration of the edges of my body, as her stomach speaks to my breasts, and her raspy breaths tickle my cerebellum. The compulsive cleaning of bottles, dummies, toys, and hands. The white-hot rage that burns the back of my throat when someone or something wakes the baby. And the wild emotion I feel towards my baby. Not love, not even close. Something much more frightening, totalising, huge, and heavy.

I get fixated on one symptom of postnatal depression: ‘feelings of not being able to cope’. What does it mean to ‘cope’? If my baby and I are alive at the end of the day, have we coped? Is it enough to cope? My baby is beautiful and healthy and funny and adorable – shouldn’t I be the happiest woman in the world? I feel shame, frustration, confusion. And even with my partner doing his best to administer my daily blood thinning injections, and pain killers, and iron-rich foods, and lucozades, I feel adrift, abandoned.

I thought maternity leave would be a great opportunity to finally play some of the games in my backlog, but I’ve never had less leisure time. When my partner returns to work, I spend every spare moment frantically doing sick-stained laundry, sterilising bottles, and disposing of that day’s Nappy Mountain. It is monotonous and relentless. I have no energy left for socialising, for self-care, for fun.

The primary treatment for postnatal depression is ‘self-help’. Eat a healthy diet, get regular exercise, get as much sleep as you can at night. At 2am, I step on half a Hobnob as I bob my baby up and down, up and down, up and down, my lower back spasming, my arms aching. When she eventually falls asleep again, I scrape the crumbled biscuit off the carpet and eat it.

One evening, the stars align. The baby is sleeping in her crib. I make a cup of tea and drink it while it is still hot. My partner orders Deliveroo. I boot up the PlayStation and scroll through our downloaded games. My nerves are too frayed for a horror game. I don’t want to play anything punishing – I already feel like I’m playing life on hard mode. Dave the Diver, a scuba diving and sushi-restaurant management sim, catches my eye.

The eponymous Dave, a fat, graceful diver, glides through beautiful pixel-art renderings of an underwater world. The game is surprisingly deep – pun intended: there are minigames, boss battles, a charming cast of characters whose backstories are sequentially revealed through short visual novels. Each play session is bite-sized and slips down like a maki roll. My partner and I talk about something that isn’t our baby. What’s the best way to catch a moray eel? Should we upgrade our oxygen tank? Why don’t we put pufferfish on the menu?

When your time and energy are stretched thin, playing a videogame feels forbidden. Piles of dirty clothes give you the side-eye. An unread book about baby-led weaning glares accusingly at you from the table. Your exhausted body groans in protest as you pull yourself upright. But maybe this is why it is important that you do pick up the controller and play, at least for a little while. When responding to the demands of being reproductive, you should carve out time to be totally unproductive.

The NHS ‘self-help’ recommendations for treating postnatal depression are no doubt rooted in evidence-based studies that attest to their efficacy, but I think they’re missing a key piece of advice: do nothing. Whatever your ‘nothing’ is – gaming or bingeing crime dramas or scrolling on Reddit – do that. But for a new mum to be able to do nothing, she needs the rest of the world to do something.

The true cost of the hyper-individualistic culture that dominates most of the Western world is felt acutely by new mums. ‘Self-help’ seems like the only option in the lonely context of our atomised existences. New mums should be taken care of, both by the state and by kith and kin, so that they can nurture their babies whilst also tending to their own mental health as they undergo one of the most intense existential transformations that a human being can experience.

When my baby is 5 months old, I decide the time has come to get some supermarket sushi and eat it in the park. I lay her down on her blanket between some wasabi and chopsticks and send a photo to the other mums. I caption it, “Victory!”

Emma Reay
Dr. Emma Reay is a clinical trustee for Safe In Our World.  As a videogame researcher, educator, writer, speaker and mother, her insights into postnatal depression bring a refreshingly transparent view of becoming a parent.