As a young girl, I would strain to hear the half-whispered conversations of the women around me. I vaguely remember one discussion about someone who could not shake off the “baby blues.” She just couldn’t pull herself together.

Years later, I interviewed Mary Jo Codey, the wife of state Sen. Richard Codey, about her battle with postpartum depression. I learned that PPD is not “the blues,” it is nothing a woman can shake off by taking a walk or letting someone take over the baby-care duties for a while.

It is an incapacitating, life-altering, life-threatening depression that transforms what should be a time of great joy into a personal hell.

Codey talked openly about the frightening thoughts of harming her first son, born 26 years ago. Almost as bad, she told me when we spoke again this week, was the feeling that she could never be a good mother. Fortunately, she got help.

I called her up this week because the new federal health act includes provisions for a national PPD program, an accomplishment with Jersey roots.

In 2004, Richard Codey, as Senate president, inherited the governor’s office after Jim McGreevey resigned. As the state’s first lady, Mary Jo Codey renewed her efforts to increase public awareness of PPD, which is sometimes called post partum psychosis. New Jersey enacted a program to screen all new mothers for PPD, with a hotline to connect women who suspect they have PPD to a network of care.

In 2007, inspired by Codey’s story, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) went to work to create a similar program on the federal level. Codey and actress Brooke Shields, who has written about her PPD experiences, joined in testifying before Congress to help garner support.

Success came with this week’s signing of the health care reform act.

Opposition — including claims the PPD legislation was just a plot by pharmaceutical companies to make money medicating mothers — forced a compromise so there is, unfortunately, no federal screening program. But there is a public education component and there will be research.

There is also $3 million for grants to provide support services to women. A lot of people fuss about federal expenditures, particularly in the new health act. With estimates that 800,000 women a year are affected by PPD, that $3 million comes to less than $4 per woman. Stop the fussing.

Not unlike the health care act overall, the program faced opposition based on half truths and flat out lies, often told by people who don’t know what’s in the text. They just accept the whispers. But Menendez said the opposition helped push the learning curve among his colleagues as the lawmakers sought the truth about PPD.

The federal legislation is named the Melanie Blocker Stokes Mother’s Act, for an Illinois woman whose story has been on the Oprah Winfrey Show and in Jet and Ebony Magazine. A month after giving birth in 2001, the once-vibrant career woman and doctor’s wife was in a depression so profound she stopped eating and drinking. Medication and other treatments failed her. Stokes jumped to her death from the 12th floor of a Chicago hotel.

There is a crying need to look for causes, methods of prevention and better treatment for PPD, and to implement nationwide the kind of education New Jersey has been doing.

The New Jersey program has had its problems. In the early days, women complained that the hotline failed to connect them to services. Others said they were taken off to emergency rooms by police and treated like criminals, not people in need of help. There is nothing like the bad implementation of good ideas to threaten progress.

The state Department of Health and Senior Services said it retrained and reorganized those involved in the New Jersey program and the state is closely monitoring operations for any glitches. The help line now gets more than 5,000 calls a year, both for information and referrals. A state PPD website went from 600 clicks to more than 3,000. Treatment sometimes means medication, sometimes talk therapy or a peer support group.

The department is passing out printed information in baby care centers and clothing stores, in nail salons and hair salons and other places where women gather. Good.

This problem must be part of the open, informed conversation of women. No more whispers.

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By Joan Whitlow
NJ Voices: Opinions from New Jersey