Dr. Fox: Welcome to today’s episode of “Healthful Woman,” a podcast designed to explore topics in women’s health at all stages of life. I am your host, Dr. Nathan Fox, an OBGYN and maternal fetal medicine specialist practicing in New York City. At “Healthful Woman,” I speak with leaders in the field to help you learn more about women’s health, pregnancy, and wellness.
All right. Dr. Esther Rollhaus, Esty, welcome back to the podcast. For our listeners, Esty was on last week to tell part one of her story. She herself is a reproductive psychiatrist, a physician. For you and me, Esty, we are just one minute past that story. So, we’re still sitting talking. Where we left it last week was right after your twins were born, they were premature, they were in the NICU, and they’re having sort of episodes of bradycardia where their heart rate’s dropping and apnea or stopping to breathe, and you’re in this sort of limbo state where you’re a new mom, which should be a wonderful, exciting time, but you’re also just kind of home without your babies and visiting them in the NICU and not working. And that’s where we are. So, let’s pick it up from there. So, tell me how that evolved.
Esty: Eventually, they were able to come home. We had Nadav’s pidyon haben, we had their bris and simcha pot, which for your listeners who aren’t familiar with those, they’re just celebrations. I remember the…Nadav’s party was actually so devastating because Kira was still in the NICU. And so, this wasn’t…and had just had another bradycardia episode. So, she had to stay another five days to make sure that that wasn’t going to happen again. It was a very sad simcha. It was a very sad, happy occasion for me. The bris, though, the bris and simcha pot felt finally like, okay, this is a normative experience. I don’t think there was a mother who was ever happier to hand over their child to the mohel. Just do what you gotta do. This is normal. After I had seen him prodded and poked and all of that, I was like, this is a normal experience, finally, for my kid.
Dr. Fox: When was that compared to when they were born, meaning how much later?
Esty: Yeah. It was about seven or eight weeks. They were born in September and this is November.
Dr. Fox: Wow. Okay. That’s quite some time.
Esty: Yeah. Finally, I go back to work. So, this is kind of a comment on the medical system and ways in which this could be a lot better of, you know, six weeks was the standard I had negotiated because I was having twins to have three months. And I’m so glad I did because the first six weeks were them in the NICU.
Dr. Fox: Right.
Esty: So, had I returned, I never would have been home with them at all. So, the first six-ish weeks were, you know, the NICU time and then about six weeks I’m home with them. We had a lot of help, thank God. We had a night nurse, we had a nanny, and my husband was also very involved and very present. Because they couldn’t nurse, I was pumping and then we were feeding them simultaneously. But it was…I was like, one plus one does not equal two when it comes to twins. It’s exponential, really.
Dr. Fox: Okay. There you go. Yeah. So, it’s a team approach.
Esty: Yeah. I returned to work. It was very tough because they had made me do 12 months of intakes in only 9 months. Meaning, I had done less time, but my workload wasn’t reduced. So, I was working very hard, you know, trying to come back, trying to pump, just trying to manage everything in the way that I had before, and it wasn’t working.
About four months in, we’re feeding the twins, and Kira stops breathing in my arms. So, she had had another apnea episode, which they had reassured us after the NICU, you know, that’s not going to happen again. Their brains are mature, go home and trust that they’ll be okay. And unfortunately, she was not.
We ended up in the emergency room really trying to figure out what had caused this episode. And we had never…we never did figure out why it happened, which was a good thing in that there wasn’t a diagnosis for Kira, and the prognosis was that she would fully recover. But mentally, for me, this meant that it can happen anytime ever, and without rhyme or reason.
Dr. Fox: Yeah. Whether you’re home or not home.
Esty: Yeah. Right. And in the middle of the night. And that’s where I think I started to develop trauma, acute trauma symptoms, couldn’t sleep anymore, just was so activated and anxious. My whole nervous system was just completely hyper aroused, scanning for danger, all of it, exceedingly anxious.
Dr. Fox: When you say…I want to talk about that for a second. So, when you say exceedingly anxious, do you mean beyond the pale of norm? Because I think most people listening are like, your baby stopped breathing and like, yeah, I mean, who wouldn’t be completely freaking out afterwards for quite some time? How do you distinguish whether that’s just…I mean, I guess I’m asking you professionally. How do you distinguish whether that’s like, yeah, I’m mama bear, I’m protecting this kid versus I have an anxiety disorder or whatever it is, PTSD?
Esty: Yeah. Okay. So, I love this question because that’s when everyone is coming to me and they’re saying, no, no, I’m a normal person. And I’m like, right, I know. You have a new life, you have a new baby, your circumstances are difficult for whatever reasons it is. How could I not have PTSD? And so, the reason I had PTSD makes perfect sense, but it was causing a lot of functional impairment. So, at that point, I’m just not okay. I’m attending work, but like a zombie, not sleeping, not eating, just kind of all of that functionality. And so, those aren’t mutually exclusive. Meaning, you can have an actual clinical disorder for reasons that make perfect, perfect sense.
Dr. Fox: Right. Okay. So, that’s where you are. You have a very good reason, but you’re not well.
Esty: Exactly. And then I would say that things progressed into, really, a depression. So, really, a postpartum depression, couldn’t enjoy anything, like not just the babies, but just everything. Was really slogging through, it was so hard to get out of bed. And I was getting out of bed, but like a robot.
Dr. Fox: Were you aware that it was a depression at the time?
Esty: Yeah, I think so. But I knew I was floundering, but I didn’t know how to help. I didn’t know what to do. I was seeing a psychiatrist. I was on a low dose of an SSRI at the time. Looking back, and this is where my reproductive psychiatry lens comes in of like, oh, no, now I know what I would have done back then, and really recognize the urgency of what was going on back then. And that, I think, is the window where I could have, should have got help, more help back then. So, I think I was doing the right thing. You know, I was in therapy, I was in psychiatric treatment, but it wasn’t sufficient. And I don’t think I fully communicated the extent of my distress either.
Dr. Fox: Understood. Okay. So, how did that go with time?
Esty: This time, it ended up getting worse to the extent that I actually became psychotic. And what that means is I started becoming delusional, meaning having beliefs that weren’t true, that didn’t make any sense, but I continued to believe them. So, this is kind of where paranoia came in that people were trying to take care…take away my babies. Because I was such an unfit mother, and you know, that became like a thought that I was going through my head of that, they were actually in jeopardy of being taken away.
And that continued to escalate and escalate. The whole world stopped making sense to me. So, there were moments where I had some insight into this of like, huh, what? It’s kind of like a nightmare that you can’t wake up from. You know something is wrong because the world didn’t work like this before, but you don’t know how to get out of it. And you’re kind of like, is this real? Is this not real? Kind of in that liminal state.
Dr. Fox: Yeah. So, just for our listeners, most people are aware that there is a concept after birth that many women have some form of, you know, mood changes, formally called the blues, whatever it is. But then there’s a line that people cross, and they can have clinical postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety. And I think most people listening to this podcast are well aware of that and, you know, sort of understand conceptually.
But there is something called postpartum psychosis, which is much more rare and much…if it can be, it’s much, much scarier. It’s a really, really…it’s like a…it’s an emergency, so to speak, because like you said, people…you know, postpartum depression, obviously, is horrible, but in postpartum psychosis, there’s a break from reality, and it can manifest in many, many different ways. Some of them are obviously just very bad to have a break from reality, but they can become dangerous, to you, to yourself, to the baby, or in your case, the babies. It could be really, really terrible, but it’s very rare. It’s very unusual. I mean, I don’t know how many patients I see with postpartum psychosis, but it’s a few. And I imagine that for you, you must, you know, 100 to 1 postpartum depression to postpartum psychosis in terms of treating people. It’s just a very unusual thing.
Esty: Yeah. So, there’s actually a movement going on to not use the word rare anymore with postpartum psychosis.
Dr. Fox: Okay. Hit me. What do we got?
Esty: Yeah. I don’t know what they’re saying instead, but not rare.
Dr. Fox: [crosstalk 00:10:29] not common.
Esty: I mean, it isn’t, right? I mean, it’s definitely much less common than kind of the general postpartum anxiety and depression. But there’s a thought that it makes us underdiagnose it if we say it’s rare, because it actually probably is actually a little bit less rare than we think. And it can be…we might be missing it in actually a good number of cases. And then it kind of contributes a little bit to the stigma of like, oh, I’m the rare one, you know. Like, oh, I don’t want to be medically rare. So, I think it’s reassuring to your listeners of this is very unlikely to happen, but it does happen. It can happen.
Dr. Fox: Okay. I will take it under advisement. It is less common than postpartum depression.
Esty: Exactly. Exactly.
Dr. Fox: Fine. Did your psychiatrist pick up on this?
Esty: No. No. Because also part of this was that the delusion was that people were going to take care of my…take away my babies.
Dr. Fox: Oh. So, if I tell my psychiatrist I have these thoughts, they’re going to take my babies from me.
Esty: Yeah. And at that point, I had lost so…I had really lost insight. So, at some point, I started experiencing hallucinations. And I didn’t know…I’m looking back on this and that’s what I’m calling them. But you know, you can kind of picture what are hallucinations, like spooky voices being like, I’m a hallucination, right? When people ask you, are you hearing voices? No, I was just hearing the way I’m hearing you right now or hearing myself. I was hearing that.
But now, looking back, I’m like, I couldn’t have possibly heard that because that was too far away. Or why would a person be seeing something like that, like something so derogatory? That doesn’t fit into the character. I was hearing organ music, which is so random. I don’t know. Yeah. So random. But those were all hallucinations, looking back on it now, that I didn’t know. They felt very real to me.
And then things really escalated where I felt that all people with sunglasses were part of an FBI-like agency trying to target me. It just really kind of escalated tremendously that there were cameras watching me, I wasn’t able to sleep. And traveling to the psychiatrist, I thought that the taxi driver was “in on it,” whatever that meant, into this plot. The psychiatrist was in on it. This is the extent to which I lost insight. He had given me a little bit of…a small dose of anti-psychotic medication. And at that point, I wouldn’t take it because I thought it was a roofie.
Dr. Fox: Oh, God.
Esty: Yeah. Oh, God, right?
Dr. Fox: Yeah.
Esty: Like full on psychotic.
Dr. Fox: How long was this going on until your family realized that this is just…you know, something has to be done?
Esty: I think it was smoldering for about two weeks. So, kind of in and out. I think that Sunday, Monday, I was full-on psychotic. Tuesday, they took me to the doctor. I went to the emergency room, and they told me I was anxious and gave me an Ativan. Meanwhile, I’m hearing full-on organ music. And also at that point, I was lying. I’m like, I know something’s wrong, but it might have presented from the outside as anxiety. But I was full-on hallucinating and delusional. About two days passed in which I wasn’t sleeping, not acting like myself. And that’s when I finally got psychiatrically hospitalized.
Dr. Fox: Wow. How long did you have to be in the hospital?
Esty: I was there for 11 days.
Dr. Fox: Wow.
Esty: Worst 11 days of my life.
Dr. Fox: I would imagine.
Esty: Yeah. Part of it…the beginning part of it was I was also still completely delusional. So, I didn’t understand what was going on for me. I felt like all the patients there were in on it. It was certainly an interesting cast of characters with whom I never spent time as a peer, only as a doctor.
Dr. Fox: Right.
Esty: And it felt so degrading to me to be there with the other people in the psych hospital, to be honest with you. I would see the psychiatrist come in and then leave at the end of the day. And I so badly wanted to go with them.
Dr. Fox: Was it your colleagues who were taking care of you?
Esty: Thank God, no. I chose a hospital that I didn’t have as many professional contacts with.
Dr. Fox: Yeah. No, that makes…that would have compounded it, for sure. Yeah. And during this 11 days, what’s it like for your family?
Esty: So, our family… So, we still have twins to take care of. So, what happened with…as I was becoming more and more psychotic, thank God my delusions were not about the babies or harming the babies. It was more initially protective. But what happened as I became sicker and sicker was I forgot about them. This part also pains me tremendously, but I forgot about them. I became wrapped in to the delusional state of people trying to find me, the cameras, all of those things, that I just…they slipped my mind.
And so, my husband was working so hard to take care of them. Thank God we have family in the area, and they stepped in. The twins went to live with family members while I was away, and my husband visited me every day. Friends came to the psych hospital, some mentors came to the psych hospital. I think our community really stepped in to the extent that they knew what was going on. And I was trying to be both private, but also really seek community help.
Dr. Fox: Wow. That’s crazy. I mean, it’s just so awful. I mean, it’s just so awful for you, for everyone to go through that. I mean, it’s just so hard. But ultimately, when you left the hospital, did you feel like yourself again or close to it?
Esty: I didn’t feel delusional. I didn’t feel psychotic anymore. I felt miserable because, oh, my God, what had just happened to me? At some point, I was treated with anti-psychotic medication in the hospital. At some point, some level of my sanity came back to me and my husband showed up with a really cute picture of our twins. And I remember this picture so well. And I was like, oh, them. Oh, my God. How are they? And then leaving the hospital, I was like, oh, just so much guilt that I wasn’t there with them. And then this identity shift of like, excuse me, I’m not a patient. I’m a psychiatrist.
Dr. Fox: Yeah. I can imagine. How long after that did you have to be out of work? I’m just trying to get a sense of recovery. I mean, you’re still recovering from something like that, but I mean recovery from that. What does that look like? So, you come home from the hospital, you’re obviously better than you were before, but you’re not cured, so to speak. What is the timeline like after that for you?
Esty: So, I will say that I’m so lucky that I got to go to The Motherhood Center. So, I’ve listened to your podcast before. It reads like an ad for The Motherhood Center, but because it’s amazing and I credit it with giving me my life back.
And so, what they have there is a day treatment program. So, it’s an intensive outpatient program where you do…it’s like 9 to 3. You do group therapy, art therapy, yoga. You can have your children on site. There’s babysitting there, doing attachment work, DBT, CBT, and medication management. So, wraparound services that were life-saving. It was incredible. And very slowly, through the power of the groups, I tried to integrate these identities as, you know, I’m here as a patient in this program, and I can also be a psychiatrist. That part of me isn’t gone. It’s going to come back.
Dr. Fox: Right. I mean, a day program, it’s basically how you transition from being an inpatient to an outpatient. You get the inpatient type of care, but you also get to go home to your family and sleep in your own bed and sort of feel like you’re part of your family again, rather than locked up somewhere, which is I’m sure how you felt when you started there in the hospital.
Esty: So, the episode happened in September 2017. And I was in the day treatment program until, I think, about January or February. And then after that, I started going once a week as a step down to groups, about once a week maintenance group. Around that time, we also found a medication that was helpful for the depression. So, I would say that the antipsychotic was very helpful for the psychosis, but I was remaining quite depressed. And so, around March of 2018 is when finally the depression lifted. And you know, when you ask, when did you feel yourself again? Then I had a lot of recovery to do, but I would say that was finally the moment of remission of the symptoms.
Dr. Fox: Six months.
Esty: Mm-hmm. The longest six months of my life. Yeah.
Dr. Fox: Wow. After you go through all of that, you start to…your life is getting back together, so to speak. You’re going back to work. You have these kids. How do you grapple during that time period with just that concept that you are a psychiatrist and you’ve just gone through the darkest psychiatric problems that someone’s going to go through after delivery? Is that something that is weighing you down? Is it something that you’re using for inspiration? I’m just trying to understand how are you processing what just happened to you. Again, you’re a psychiatrist. Everyone’s going to process it in some way or another. But this is the added layer of like, this is me, you know, I’m treating these things.
Esty: Yeah. I would say that the higher-level processing came later. At this point, I’m trying to maintain functioning.
Dr. Fox: Right. Survival.
Esty: So, I’m getting through the day. Yeah. And so, what had happened with my training was I had missed the fourth year of my training. So, I wasn’t even graduating from psychiatry residency. I mean, that left me in limbo, not even a degree. My plan had always been to go on to child psychiatry, which is two years. You can do something called fast tracking into child psychiatry, which means that you miss your fourth year, you do your first year of child psychiatry, then you graduate. You retroactively graduate residency, next year you graduate fellowship.
And so, what was very difficult, I was planning to do a fourth year because I really wanted to be a chief. I was so excited about being the education chief. I love teaching. That piece was very disappointing, they didn’t work out. So, my class graduated without me that June. And my plan was to go through child fellowship and graduate the next year.
Dr. Fox: The following year. Right.
Esty: Yeah.
Dr. Fox: So, do your first year of fellowship at the same time you’re doing your fourth year of residency.
Esty: Correct.
Dr. Fox: So, ultimately, you would finish at the same time you had planned, but you missed that fourth year of residency that you would have otherwise had.
Esty: No, I had to finish a year later. Meaning, I was planning to do four…I was planning to do six years.
Dr. Fox: Four plus two.
Esty: [crosstalk 00:22:20] four and two, yeah, to not fast track.
Dr. Fox: Right. And so, you did…you ended up doing three plus zero plus two.
Esty: Right. Exactly. So, calendar-wise, I graduated a year…I graduated residency a year later than expected.
Dr. Fox: Right. Okay. Understood. Yeah. True.
Esty: And that, for me, was getting through the day. That, to me, was one step in front of the other functioning. I told the program what I had just been through, my co-residents knew. And that is where I used every skill in the book to get through the day. So, I remember how long the hallway to the lunchroom felt. And it was literally like one step in front of the other mindfulness, basically. And every month that I completed, I would buy myself something like a manicure or pocketbook or just something like that, because every month was a struggle. And I felt like I clawed my way through it in a way that I’m actually so proud of.
Dr. Fox: Yeah. I mean, you came out of the depths of hell. Right? And you are…I mean, that’s unbelievable. Now, you have another kid. Right?
Esty: We do.
Dr. Fox: You have a third. And did you… After all this. Right? So, you have your twins, and they’re great. And you went through the worst thing imaginable. And you’re, you know, moving forward in your life. What was it like trying to figure out if and how you would have a third?
Esty: Yeah. At that point, the family subjectively felt incomplete to me. I would look at pictures and I would see my twins, and the four of us and just feel like somebody was missing from it. It wasn’t a numbers thing. It wasn’t like I need to have three children. It just was…there just felt like there was someone missing. And at that point, it was devastating because we decided that we weren’t going to have any more children, that that was way too risky. The relapse rate for postpartum psychosis is about 30%. And I had way too much to lose. I couldn’t do that to my husband, my kids, to my career, like that [crosstalk 00:24:26]. To myself. Yeah. Let’s not forget that one.
Yeah. I couldn’t do it. And my husband was even firmer about that of like, no, we’re not doing that again. And that is when we found out about the option of surrogacy. So, surrogacy is where somebody carries a pregnancy for you. So, in our case, it was our embryo, our full siblings of Kira and Nadav. And our amazing surrogate carried her into life.
Dr. Fox: What state was your surrogate in?
Esty: New York, actually. So, this happened in 2021, right when it became legal…
Dr. Fox: Got it. So, local.
Esty: …to do paid surrogacy. So, it was actually local. It was like a 40-minute flight. What’s so interesting is that often surrogacy is a horrible ordeal for people. And I don’t want to minimize surrogacy. It’s so much in terms of the emotions and the logistics. It’s a really complicated process. But for me, in this multi-part story, this was the easiest reproductive challenge we had gone through. For example, our surrogate on day five post-transfer shows us a picture of a positive pregnancy test. I’d never seen one of those in my life. Even with Kira and Nadav, I wouldn’t even take an out-of-home pregnancy test. I just took the doctor’s word. I was traumatized from those things.
And everything about this experience was so corrective, thank God. Our Leila [SP] was born healthy. She was born on time. She was pink when she was born. When my husband met her for the first time, he’s like, where are the wires? Is she supposed to be hooked up to something? What’s happening? We can just touch her and hold her? And what a gift. What an unbelievable gift, after all of this, to be able to have this gorgeous, healthy baby after what was actually a very smooth pregnancy. I get that I wasn’t the one pregnant. So, obviously, smooth. But it was [crosstalk 00:26:29].
Dr. Fox: Smooth for her, very smooth for you. Yeah.
Esty: Yeah. It was an uncomplicated pregnancy. And to come home and take home a healthy baby who slept through…mostly slept through the night, who didn’t have feeding difficulties, who joined our family right away was just a bracha, like a blessing, an unbelievable experience.
Dr. Fox: And you got to be a mom for a newborn.
Esty: Yeah. And I got my first experience of being able to be there with her, to actually…and just experience joy. And her middle name is Joy, Leila Joy. And that’s what she is as a personality. But in terms of my subjective experience with her of just…she has been an absolute bundle of joy in a way that’s been so corrective. I will say, for anyone who’s thinking about bonding and bonding after postpartum psychosis or postpartum depression, Kira and Nadav are my life. I mean, not to the exclusion of Leila, but gosh, do I love those two. And even though our beginning was very hard, we were able to recover our relationship as well.
Dr. Fox: That’s a really important point. When you were having your pregnancy with Leila, with a carrier, with a surrogate, were you…did people know about this? Was it very open? Was it very private? How did you navigate that?
Esty: We tend to be very open with people. It was actually very interesting. We were moving to a new neighborhood at the time. And so, people didn’t know our story at all. And we kind of would…be like, hello, I’m Esty, I’m Jonathan. You know, by the way…just kind of, by the way, we’re expecting a baby through surrogacy because we didn’t want it to be a sudden, you know, the baby’s born and shocker, right? So, we were kind of very open, like aggressively open about this of like, you can’t see it, but just so you know, in February, we’re expecting a baby.
Dr. Fox: Yeah. I imagine everyone’s just, that’s cool. That’s awesome.
Esty: Yeah. Good for you. Good for you. We really got…
Dr. Fox: You look great.
Esty: They always look down at your abdomen, by the way. We’re expecting a baby. And then it’s through surrogacy, and then they look back up at your face.
Dr. Fox: Nah, your baby’s small. Yeah. Wow. Amazing. So, we’re here in 2026 and you’re a professional psychiatrist. You see people with all sorts of things, including the things you just described. Looking back on all this, what do you take away for yourself from this whole experience and where you are professionally? And then I’m going to ask you sort of what do you think people should take away for themselves from this, from hearing your story?
Esty: You know, the feeling that comes to mind now is feeling so blessed and so grateful. You know, I got better. And that’s one of the things that I love about PMADs, of postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, is that actually people can recover. And for me, I would say, I experienced posttraumatic growth. There’s so many things now that I do differently. I have slowed down tremendously. I’m not perfect. And that was something that, you know, kind of going through medical school, like, I can do this, I can do anything. I’m not asking for help, etc. This has really slowed me down in a beautiful way. My friendships have gotten deeper. My ability to mother my kids is with a sense of purpose and nuance and trying to combat shame, you know?
Someone asked me, okay, you’re going to do this podcast. What if your kids hear it? And I was like, oh, no, when they’re older, I totally want them to hear it. I hope that they’re inspired by it. You know, I hope that they can see that bad things can happen to you in life and you can survive them. This is something that I am really proud of.
I remember sitting in group, which was such a…back in The Motherhood Center. And somebody, one of the other patients had said to me, this is…to try to alleviate my, like, I don’t understand, I’m a psychiatrist, how could this happen to me? And she’s like, this is going to make you an amazing psychiatrist. And at the time, I was thinking something along the lines of F you. I’m just like, excuse me, this was not worth it. I don’t care how great of a psychiatrist I’m going to be. And I will say this. I wish that this had never happened to me.
To this day, I’m doing great. But if I could have not had this thing, not had, you know, the postpartum, not had the infertility, I would choose that 100%. In life, you don’t get to choose what happens to you. You get to choose what you do about it. And that’s just a message that I really…I take it to heart. And I do think I’m a better psychiatrist for it.
Dr. Fox: That’s amazing. You answered both questions in one answer, which is just great, because that is…I mean, that’s such an important lesson, you know, for those of us hearing your story, that this idea that…I mean, it’s…you know, the horrible irony of the psychiatrist having this, and…but…or as you would say, and using it…I picked up on that. Don’t worry.
Esty: Yeah. DBT, dialectic.
Dr. Fox: I picked up on that very, very clearly. All right, not using the R word anymore. That’s not going to happen. Not only are you able to reflect yourself on it and your own life and how it impacts who you are as a person, but also, really, the advice and the insight you’re able to give to others, like your patients…and it’s not the trite, oh, I’ve been through this and I got through it and so can you. That’s not really helpful. It’s just this idea that you have a perspective that you can share with people that, yeah, it’s not good now, and it really sucks. But it will get better. It takes time, it takes treatment, it takes all these things. But this is not the rest of your life and it will get better. And when you get better, you could potentially come out of it as a stronger, deeper person from that experience, even if you don’t want to have had it, obviously.
Esty: A hundred percent. Exactly. And when I’m sitting and meeting somebody for the first time, besides for them saying, I’m a normal person, please believe me, psychiatrist, I’m like, I know, I know, I know. But the second thing they say is, this is going to be forever. This is it. This is it. My life is over. I hear that all the time. And very gently, I tell them, that’s what the depression is telling you right now. That’s a symptom of what you’re going through. That’s not real. And I don’t tell them my story, but I kind of feel like the patients, they know I’m not bullshitting them. They know, and part of that is my psychiatric experience and my patients, thank God, get better. But I know this on a very, very deep level. And so, without imparting the details of my story, I feel like they know.
Dr. Fox: It’s great. Amazing. Esty, thank you so much for doing this.
Esty: Yeah. Thank you for this opportunity.
Dr. Fox: Yeah. Thank you for coming on and sharing your story. And I guess, really, for the first time publicly, it’s really important. It’s really helpful. And I know that all my listeners appreciate it, but I really do as well, of course. Thank you.
Esty: Yeah. It feels good, actually. You know, you said that at the beginning, you know, that there’s something powerful. I’m actually like, oh, I feel relieved.
Dr. Fox: It’s great. There we go. See? Look at that. Amazing. All right. Good stuff.
Esty: Thank you.
Dr. Fox: All right.
Esty: All right. Thank you.
Dr. Fox: Thank you for listening to the “Healthful Woman” podcast. To learn more about our podcast, please visit our website at www.healthfulwoman.com. That’s healthfulwoman.com. If you have any questions about this podcast or any other topic you would like us to address, please feel free to email us at hw@healthfulwoman.com. Have a great day.
The information discussed in “Healthful Woman” is intended for educational uses only. It does not replace medical care from your physician. “Healthful Woman” is meant to expand your knowledge of women’s health and does not replace ongoing care from your regular physician or gynecologist. We encourage you to speak with your doctor about specific diagnoses and treatment options for an effective treatment plan.
