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Hello and welcome to Mormon Stories. This is Natasha Helfer Parker and this is another episode in our Mental Health Volational Series.

And today with me I have Sarah, Mother of Four, here to talk to me about postpartum depression.

She is a lifelong member of the church and has struggled with depression since adolescence.

And is here to speak with us today about her experiences specifically with postpartum depression.

And before we get started, I just like to make a few pre-cluding comments.

As far as our goals for this podcast tonight, one is basically just to share a story and to share an experience and hopefully reach out to other women who have dealt with similar topics.

By no means are we going to be all inclusive and by no means is Sarah's experience going to resonate with everyone who has had postpartum depression.

Some people have postpartum depression only as part of giving birth without any history of depression in their past.

Some have a history of depression in their past and then also struggle with postpartum depression.

And there's lots of different ways and reasons and etc that all of this can develop.

The second thing I want to say is that this is not a podcast that's going to touch on her testimony or issues surrounding kind of her relationship with the church.

Other than we will be speaking briefly about how her beliefs and I guess construct around church issues has affected some of her ways that she dealt with her depression or thought about her depression.

And during her journey with that being said, I want to welcome Sarah. Hello. Hi. Thank you for having me. Oh, thanks for being here. I really appreciate it.

I think that this is a very important topic to be discussing and I'm just very glad you're willing to do this for us.

So I'd like to start with a little bit of just your background and specifically give us your background regarding when you felt like you started noticing that depression was a part of your life and made some family history around that or etc.

Well, basic background that is a listener to Mormon stories one might find interesting would be I am a lifelong member of the church. I grew up in the church.

Both my parents were born and raised in the church. Both sets of their parents were born and raised in the church. All the sets of great grandparents were born and raised in the church.

In fact, a multi-generational lots of Mormons crossing the plains and I'm the oldest of a lot of kids in my family actually six.

And now anti-depressants as they were crossing the plains, right?

Not not that are recorded, not that we have found a history of now, but thank you for asking.

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