This TED Talk features reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks, recorded live at TED Residency 2018.

Do you remember a time when you felt hormonal and moody?

Your skin was breaking out, your body was growing in strange places and very fast,

and at the same time, people were expecting you to be grown up in this new way.

Teenagers, right?

Well, these same changes happen to a woman when she's having a baby.

And we know that it's normal for teenagers to feel all over the place, so why don't we talk about

pregnancy in the same way?

There are entire textbooks written about the developmental arc of adolescence, and we don't

even have a word to describe the transition to motherhood.

We need one.

I'm a psychiatrist who works with pregnant and postpartum

women, a reproductive psychiatrist, and in the decade that I've been working in this field,

I've noticed a pattern. It goes something like this. A woman calls me up, she's just had a baby,

and she's concerned. She says, I'm not good at this. I'm not enjoying this.

Do I have postpartum depression? So I go through the symptoms of that diagnosis, and it's clear to me that

she's not clinically depressed, and I tell her that. But she isn't reassured. It isn't supposed to feel like this, she insists. So I say,

okay, what did you expect it to feel like? She says, I thought motherhood would make me feel whole

and happy. I thought my instincts would naturally tell me what to do. I thought I'd always want to put the baby first.

This is an unrealistic expectation of what the transition to motherhood feels like.

And it wasn't just her. I was getting calls with questions like this from hundreds of women,

all concerned that something was wrong

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