Louis Theroux: Mothers on the Edge, review: a sensitive, extraordinary look at postpartum psychosis
The harsher realities of family life, for some, was the subject of Louis Theroux: Mothers on the Edge (BBC Two), in which the documentary-maker turned his lens on women dealing with mental illness brought on by childbirth. The opening sequence, of a new mother needing to be encouraged to touch her own baby, set the film’s tone.
“For all its joys, new motherhood can be a time of extreme psychiatric difficulty,” said Theroux. And a time of extraordinary emotional complexity, as in the case of Catherine, whose articulate, calm exterior belied that she was on 24-hour one-to-one monitoring following a recent suicide attempt. Her story, of a previous baby stillborn, of grief and guilt balefully combined, of fear and despondency and unattainable expectations had a quietly raw intensity to it, as did the shocking news of a further suicide attempt later in the film.
Another new mother, Barbara, was in the grip of post-partum psychosis, her delusional beliefs about her baby, her husband and her in-laws strikingly illustrative of how detached from reality a mind in crisis can be. At the other end of the treatment cycle, Lisa, a mother of three admitted to the unit after a series of psychotic episodes, spoke of her understandable anxiety about leaving the unit and returning to the demands of motherhood unsupported.
Inevitably the emotional and psychological issues playing out here went far deeper than any hour-long documentary could untangle. And if it seemed odd, at the outset, for Theroux to be steering a course through such complex maternal waters, he proved a sensitive, sympathetic and perceptive guide.
His well-honed ability to put interviewees at ease and draw them out with blunt but emotionally on-the-mark enquiries elicited responses of extraordinary honesty in a film that, though painful to watch, was a brilliant evocation of what can go wrong when motherhood doesn’t prove as natural a role as society would have us expect, and how feelings familiar to all parents can, in some cases, tip over into an acute mental health crisis.
