Mothers are an integral part of any family setup. Any irregularity in this pivotal figure tends to destabilise an entire household.
Mental health of mothers nowadays in increasingly stressful environments has taken on critical importance for the modern day Pakistani house. A vital stage in this respect is when the youngest child or the favourite grows up and moves on to other things, taking the focus of their attention away from their mother, a person who spent many sleepless nights to take care of their child. Who were there for them come rain or hail.
Dr Qudsia Tariq, a practicing psychologist who also teaches at the Department of Psychology, University of Karachi, explained that mothers often suffer from bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression. This is a condition in which someone will have severe mood swings. These mood swings will usually last several weeks or months and are far beyond what most of us experience.
A patient of bipolar disorder experiences two sets of moods, manic, that is a mood of hyperactivity and grandeur and mood of depression, however the depression in bipolar disorder, the feeling of depression is stronger.
For the condition to be manic, the patient gets episodes of mania. During these episodes the person becomes hyperactive, has loss of sleep, feels very happy or excited, gets irritable; gets a feeling of being grandeur, makes and executes grandeur plans, goes out to meet relatives of people whom they would normally not visit. This is termed ‘High’ or Manic. An extreme form of this condition is called ‘hypomania’, which if untreated could develop into full blown mania.
The depressive episode, termed ‘Low’, makes the person feel very depressed, they feel unhappy, they do not like to do the things that they enjoyed, would wear dull colours, they would either eat too little and thus show visible signs of weakening, or eat too much, hence conspicuous weight gain, patients would tend to withdraw from the world, their urge for copulation decreases substantially, they even think of suicide.
Mothers, especially working mothers, find it very difficult when experiencing a bipolar episode. For such women the stress levels are extremely high and thus provide a melting pot for depression and mania.
The scripts for plays where a mother is constantly scheming against her new daughter-in-law stems from real life cases borne as a result of bipolar disorder. Mothers, troubled with the thought that the ‘bahu’ is going to steal her little son from her takes outrageous steps, speaking lies to her son, do usurious acts to attract attention.
Any one watching Star Plus dramas religiously would by now be able to list quite a few tactics that such mothers use gain attention of their children. The Pakistani routine of daughter-in-laws being killed due to the blast of cylinders or being burnt by acid, having the son married a second time soon after his first marriage, could all stem from the mother having a severe case of depression or even mania.
Dr Qudsia quotes a case that came to her a while back of a 42-year-old woman. The patient’s children had grown up and gone off to college and she had become quite lonely. Unused to being alone, her disorder resulted in an episode of manic and started drinking and smoking, wearing exorbitant clothes.
Dr Rehan Hussain, of the Army Medical Centre, Rawalpindi says that the disorder is curable. “The age old belief that medicines prescribed by psychiatrists are in effect addictive drugs is false. Though there have been cases brought to me when patients have become addicted to the prescribed drugs, but modern day drugs are quite free of suppressants. Bipolar conditions can be treated quite effectively using shock therapy, psychological therapy, and cognitive therapy which aim to change the perception of the patient from their current episode”.
However, the best medicine, he says is that the people surrounding the patient be educated about disorder and be taught to deal with the episodes.