Before Elliott Rae developed PTSD after the traumatic birth of his daughter, no one had told him that dads could experience birth trauma, too. “It was a really tough time that included moments of insomnia, anxiety and flashbacks. I became really emotional,” he says. Like many men, he found it difficult to speak about what he was going through. In the years since, he has come to understand the “societal and cultural norms which contribute to dads feeling pressure to deal with everything by themselves and not talk about the challenges they are going through”.
“I think part of it was imagining an older child, rather than a baby,” another dad, Tom Spencer, tells me, reflecting on his experience of postnatal depression (his daughter is now four). “There were struggles around breastfeeding. It was really hot that summer. The lack of sleep. Maybe something about the permanence of being a parent? I just felt sad a lot. I remember my partner and me commenting on a day that neither of us cried. I remember putting her in a sling for the first time and being terrified that she had stopped breathing and I’d killed her.”
