"Dysphoric milk ejection reflex."

In this blog post at Babble, Katie Allison Granju tells about a tentatively-identified disorder called "Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex:"

 One of the things I mentioned...was how bizarrely agitated and unhappy I felt every time I used a breastpump. I described the feeling as being close to a low grade panic attack.

One of the commenters on that post left a link to a website about something called “Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex” or “D-MER.” I’d never heard of this, so I went and checked the site out, and what I found is truly fascinating, and has the potential to help a whole lot of women.

The site was started by a mother who found herself experiencing sudden and painful  feelings of sadness and disappointment every time she started to nurse her baby. She made the connection between her milk letdown (ejection reflex) and the onset of these feelings, and started trying to track down information and resources about this condition, which obviously has the potential to make it very hard for a woman to breastfeed her baby, and could also lead to more serious problems, like depression.

... I have personally known several mothers over the years who have described what I now believe to have been D-MER to me with regard to their personal breastfeeding experiences. These women recounted that they began to feel inexplicably empty and hopeless whenever they breastfed their babies; one friend told me that she had a sudden and powerful pang of what felt like homesickness when the baby would begin to nurse. Another explained that nursing her baby made her feel very anxious and agitated, like she was going to jump out of her own skin.

Check it out, and especially read some of the comments.   I didn't think I've ever experienced it, but some of the comments remind me eerily of the horrible feelings I got every time I tried to nurse the baby and the toddler at the same time (like, literally simultaneously, one on each breast).  I think I only ever attempted that about three times before I swore I would never, ever, ever do that again.

There's some more detail in Katie's post about the specific hormonal mechanisms that are implicated, and of course you can follow the link in the quote to the DMER website.

Comments

[Amy]

Thank you for spreading the word about this. I had this with all of my 5 babies, and thought I was going insane until I heard about it. I'm glad I stuck it out (8 or so years of nursing total) but it was nasty to go through. It was a different feeling though, than the crawl out of my skin feeling I would get when nursing while pregnant or tandem nursing (simultaneously, like you described). I guess it's different for all women!

[Kelly]

I definitely had a mild case of this. Most women would say that they felt an instant relaxation with the let-down, but it felt like exhaustion for me. Until I had my fourth, and had postpartum depression. Then I felt this sadness every time my milk let down. I assume it was the depression that made it feel more like sadness than the tiredness of the previous babies.

[Delores]

Yes! Finally, I am not alone in this. For me, just about every time my milk would let down, I would start to have waves of anxiety. I never heard of anyone else having this. I am going to check out the links. Thanks, Erin!

[Barbara C.]

That's interesting. I don't really know if it's D-MER, or just hitting a threshold point, but I usually starting getting anxious feelings after about 14 months of nursing. I just get this sensation where I don't feel like sharing my body anymore.

[Becca Balmes]

I had to stop nursing my 9 month old when I became pregnant again, because I got the urge to be angry with her for no good reason and had some scary momentary flashes of extreme irritation. I decided that formula was better than the emotional scarring that could come from irrational anger! I didn't want to poison our bond like that, and I'm SO glad I made that decision.

[bearing]

Becca, I hear you. I made it through all my pregnancies without weaning, but I think it's hard to nurse through a pregnancy and I don't blame anyone who decides not to -- I definitely night weaned early on in each pregnancy, deliberately.

I've only deliberately totally weaned once, and that was my almost-3-y-o #2, soon after my #3 was born. I had intended to let the weaning be much more child-led, as I had with my firstborn, but when I found myself having angry, irritable feelings *at the newborn* for wanting to nurse, I decided that was a strong sign that I needed to wean the 3yo. Very, very alarming to find myself angry at the newborn! After I weaned the 3yo, which I did over a period of maybe 6 weeks, everything got a lot better.