Welcoming a baby into the world is a wonderful and magical moment for anyone, but it can also be filled with stress, anxiety, and overwhelming challenges, especially for moms. Postpartum depression is a terrible thing to live with, and for some, the pain and anxiety of this awful condition proves to be too much to bear.
Steven D’Achille and his wife, Alexis Joy, were so happy to be starting a family together. They had a perfect pregnancy, right up to the day of delivery, but that’s when everything started to go wrong for the happy couple.
Their daughter, Adriana, was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. She lived, but the stress of the situation immediately started to affect Alexis.
Alexis seemed to blame herself for the baby’s difficult birth, feeling that the first thing she’d done as a mother was hurt her child, and no matter how lovingly Steven explained to her that this wasn’t the case, she simply couldn’t forget what had happened.
In the weeks that followed, her stress levels began to build up. She started to hear phantom cries in the night, had problems getting Adriana to breastfeed, and spent long hours crying. In Steven’s words:
It was very apparent that this was much more severe than the baby blues. It was literally watching somebody you love just completely fall apart and unravel.
Just a few weeks after giving birth, the signs of Alexis’ stress were becoming more and more apparent. She lost a huge amount of weight, dropping down to 10 lbs less than she weighed before getting pregnant.
But the worst was yet to come. Just six weeks after giving birth, Alexis took her own life. She was 30 years old.
The worst part of all was that the couple had clearly known that something was wrong and tried to seek help, but Alexis’ situation just wasn’t taken seriously enough.
We knew Alexis was in trouble. We went to seven different hospitals and facilities in her last 13 days. She was very, very honest with everybody, and that’s the thing that breaks my heart. At that time, help just didn’t exist. She got an appointment with a doctor, but it was a two-month wait. In that time my wife did not survive her battle with postpartum depression.
Steven was left as a single dad, heartbroken but determined to give his daughter the best possible life, while also honoring his wife’s memory by working to help other women deal with postpartum stress and anxiety.
He decided to found a non-profit named The Alexis Joy Foundation, working with local health networks and authorities to provide better perinatal and postpartum mental health care.
I want to fix the problem. My daughter isn’t the only kid without a parent and I’m not the only husband without a wife (because of suicide).
The Alexis Joy Foundation helped to open a whole new treatment center in Pittsburgh, offering potentially life-saving care for new moms and moms-to-be.
The center provides outpatient therapeutic programs, intensive sessions, and various other services designed to help women feel comfortable, at ease, and totally supported in the early days, weeks, and months of motherhood.
Steven has made such a difference to the lives of so many women, and he’s loving being a dad too.
Adriana, meanwhile, likes to hear stories about her mother and is proud of her father, who, in her eyes, is “changing the world”.
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