After giving birth, Laura experienced hellish paranoia and delusions

I'm changing my two-week-old son's nappy. He bursts into tears. His tears explode my heart but I can't comfort him because I'm exploding too, only I wish I had the primal courage to cry out like him. I am unable to soothe him. To tell him everything will be OK, because I'm not sure that's true.

I've not told anyone about the days of incessant racing thoughts and snakes of paranoia, the strangling anxiety and rampant insomnia. I'm embarrassed because it sounds 'strange', 'dramatic' and 'silly', but nothing is 'OK' any more.

The radio has been playing songs about me; the potted fig tree outside is trying to tell me something; and that teddy bear is watching me with CCTV eyes. Don't worry, I know this isn't good. It certainly isn't what I'd read about in the books and forums that promised this Golden Time of new motherhood would be the best moment of my life. So how can I say, out loud, that the day my son was born, and the brutal, postnatal, abstract hours since, have been the very worst days of my life? Stunned with fear and medical intervention and now whatever this is.