Witness Testimony

My name is Carol Blocker and I am the mother of Melanie Blocker Stokes. My daughter took her life on June 11, 2001, less than five months after giving birth to her first child B my granddaughter, Sommer Skyy. I am here this afternoon to ask for the Committee's support for H.R. 846, the Melanie Blocker Stokes Postpartum Depression Research and Care Act, introduced on February 13, 2003 by Congressman Bobby Rush, a distinguished member of this Committee.

Congressman Rush introduced this legislation after hearing my daughter's story, which I would like to share with the members of the Committee today.

My daughter, Melanie, was born and raised in the city of Chicago. As both a child and adult, she was beautiful and accomplished and the light of my life. We educated her at St. George private school in Hyde Park, Immaculata High School in Chicago, and Spelman College in Atlanta. After she completed Spelman College, Melanie returned home to Chicago and went to work for Astra Zeneca Pharmaceutical company, where she rose to become a sales manager, and married Dr. Sam Stokes.

Sam and Melanie, were so happy in their marriage and their lives together and even happier when they learned, in 2000, that a child was on the way. The whole family, Sam=s family and ours, where ecstatic when my granddaughter B who Melanie named Sommer Skyy  - was born on February 23, 2001, after my daughter=s normal pregnancy.

But, six weeks after my daughter gave birth, at the routine six week postpartum checkups, she said that she felt "hopeless" and retreated to her room. We couldn't get her back to the doctor, back to her job or back to the world.

One day, I found her in her bedroom, hollow-eyed and gaunt, rocking in her glider. Her lips and tongue were peeling from malnutrition, because Melanie was not eating or sleeping normally. When I went to her bathroom to get her a cold towel, I found a butcher knife. I asked Melanie, "What are you going to do with this?": she looked at me and said she didn't know, but thought she would have to die.

Over the next seven weeks, Melanie was hospitalized three times - each time the doctors prescribed different combinations of antidepressant, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic medications. But, Melanie's depression had deepened to the point that she wouldn't - or couldn't - take her pills. She talked about suicide and looked for ways to harm herself. Once, he asked her brother to buy her a gun.

Another time, she took the screens out of my high-rise apartment windows while visiting me.

And another time, we found that she had sneaked away from her home and tried to drown herself in Lake Michigan. Each time, we went back to her doctors and each time, there were more prescriptions and more assumptions, but we never heard the words postpartum psychosis.

When Melanie came home after her third stay in the hospital, she seemed to be a bit better, but still I was worried, and my fears were founded.

On the night before Melanie disappeared, I told her husband Sam, "Don't let her out of your sight." But Sam had to leave for a meeting the next morning, and when he left the apartment, Melanie fled. The day was June 10, 2001, less than six months after Sommer Skyy was born.

We searched Chicago, looking for her, all weekend. We posted flyers and Sam went on the local television news pleading: "Melanie, please come home. I need you. Your baby needs you." But, Melanie didn't answer us.

While we searched, Melanie went to a hotel in Chicago and talked a clerk into letting her into a room on the twelfth floor. There she wrote six suicide notes: the notes included one to God and one to Sam, and all six of them were lined up on the night stand in the room. We found them after she died.

On June 11, 2001, as the sun rose over Lake Michigan, my beautiful daughter stepped out of a window on the twelfth floor of a hotel, to her death. My own heart died that day.

After hearing my daughter's story, Congressman Bobby Rush, a member of this distinguished Committee, asked me what could have been done to prevent my daughter's tragic end, and what additional resources were needed to help physicians and families to recognize, understand and treat this terrible syndrome - a postpartum psychosis - that affects an estimated one in 1,000 new mothers? The symptoms, many which my daughter exhibited, include losing touch with reality, distorted thinking, delusions, hyperactivity and mania: the psychosis became like a monster that entered my daughter's brain, and could not be controlled.

Even in its milder forms, postpartum depression manifests itself with lack of interest in a newborn child, fear of harming the child, fatigue, sadness, hopelessness, guilt, inadequacy and worthlessness. Some research indicates that between 50 percent and 75 percent of all new mothers suffer with these Ababy blues," yet little is known about how we, as families, can prevent the tragic consequences that fell on my family.

From our discussions, and from discussions with many physicians and health practitioners, he developed and introduced the Melanie Blocker Stokes Postpartum Depression Research and Care Act. The legislation will expand and intensify research at the National Institutes of Health and National Institutes of Mental Health on the causes, diagnoses and treatments of postpartum depression and postpartum psychoses and provide money to deliver services to individuals and their families who suffer from a postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.

Mr. Chairman, if this legislation had been in place in 2001, maybe we would have been able to recognize my daughter's trouble and prevented her death. Maybe my granddaughter would have her mother today. My granddaughter calls both me and her aunt, "Mama," and we are mothering her with all of the love and energy that we have. But, I notice that when other people look at Sommer, and they know her story, there is sadness in their eyes. They know, like I know, that Sommer deserved to have a mother - and her mother deserved to have her daughter.

Mr. Chairman and members, I hope - I pray B that this Committee will finally act on this legislation to spare countless of other women and their families from the horrible consequences of this disease.

Thank you.