Six weeks after our son was born, I sat in a sterile waiting room, preparing for my first postpartum check-up. I had been asked to fill out a form of 10 questions that I knew were designed to screen for postnatal depression and emotional difficulties.
As a licensed therapist who specializes in maternal mental health, I’ve handed that exact form to my own clients more times than I can count. I’ve built my career around knowing what a concerning set of answers is supposed to trigger. Which means I also knew exactly how to answer those questions so nothing would happen.
And that’s exactly what I did. I legit lied on the perinatal mood disorder questionnaire.
I lied about my sleep. I lied about my mood. I specifically lied about the rapid, nonstop panic attacks that had become the background noise of my entire day. My entire postpartum life, really, minus a few hours of interrupted sleep here and there. I circled the answers that I knew wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
When the medical assistant called me back, I handed her the questionnaire, changed into a paper gown and sat there under the fluorescent lights waiting for the provider to come in, knowing exactly what I had just done. Given a little, but not enough.
My actual truth, the one that didn’t make it onto the form, looked like this: I started my day when my son woke up at 3 a.m. to nurse. I was functioning on very little sleep, basically no food and an old prescription of benzos (which a provider had approved) in an attempt to calm my nervous system.
My mom had come from California to stay until I returned to work after a particularly ugly crying session in which I begged her not to leave. We mostly watched the worst trash TV while she reminded me frequently that I was doing a good job. My husband had returned to work, and I felt encouraged on the days I could muster the energy to take my new baby and my dog for a walk around the block alone.
And still, despite being trained to know better, I lied on the form. I did it because I knew exactly what was waiting for me on the other side of the truth: a script for a starter dose of some SSRI and a referral to some type of medication provider.
This is the dance that many postpartum moms are forced to dance: The OB says it’s a PCP problem, the PCP says it’s a psychiatric problem and the psychiatrist has a two-month wait. They also may or may not take your insurance and may or may not be trained in perinatal mental health. And so I lied, to avoid having a hard conversation about my mood with a provider who I didn’t trust. And the totally honest part: I would do it again.
Instead, I walked out of that room and called a psychiatrist I knew personally ― we’d worked together, we’d been pregnant at the same time. I told her everything, and within hours, she had connected me to the right kind of care: a psychiatrist who specialized in perinatal and infant mental health, who knew which medications were compatible with breastfeeding, who treated what I was going through as a predictable medical event instead of a character flaw.
I think about that call a lot, because not only did it change the course of postpartum for me, but also because I know how incredibly lucky it was that I had someone to call.
Most women struggling with postpartum mental health do not happen to have a psychiatrist friend in their contacts list. Most new moms don’t work, as I did, in the very hospital system where they gave birth. Most women don’t have the professional fluency to recognize their own crisis clinically, in real time.
I had every possible advantage a new mom could have had and I still looked at being honest as a risk. What does that mean for the new mom who has none of those advantages? The 99% of new moms who don’t have the doctor friend, or the hospital badge or the ability to leave work early for a psychiatry appointment in the building next door to where they work.
I think about this gap constantly, both as a patient who lived it and as a clinician who treats women living it. These questionnaires are trivially easy to lie on, and mothers do it constantly. I don’t think they do so because they’re in denial. I think they’re doing exactly what I did: a fast, silent, completely rational calculation that telling the truth won’t benefit them. That’s not a mother failing to be honest, that’s a mother not trusting the system that is supposed to support her.
Screening without a resourced, ready-to-act support system behind it isn’t really screening. It’s a meaningless box to check that makes an institution feel like they did their due diligence, in place to protect the institution and not the mother. Why ask a mother if she’s drowning if the thing waiting on the other side of a truthful answer isn’t help in the form of immediate treatment?
Postpartum Mood and anxiety disorders are not a personal failing. Childbirth causes one of the largest, fastest hormonal shifts a human body ever experiences. Add in chronic sleep deprivation, identity upheaval, a culture that expects a new mother to bounce back smiling, and a mental health crisis is a predictable, common, treatable medical event, not a character flaw. I tell my clients this constantly. I needed someone to tell me.
I lied on that form because I was smart enough to know it wouldn’t help me. That’s the unsettling part, not the lying itself. If the system can be gamed that easily, it was never really built to hold the truth in the first place. There’s no point in handing new mothers a list of boxes to check until we build a system that’s actually worth being honest with.
Erin Schlozman is a licensed clinical professional counselor working primarily in the perinatal and postpartum space. Erin’s debut book “The Myth of the Perfect Mom” came out in April of 2026. In addition to her patient work, she’s built an online community of over 200k and counting through her social media, Substack and podcast, I Love My Baby And...
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