I had a baby and then I went mad: Laura couldn't wait to be a mother. But within days of her son's birth she had descended into a hellish spiral of paranoia and delusions

I'm changing my two-week-old son's nappy. He bursts into tears. His tears explode my heart but I can't comfort him because I'm exploding too, only I wish I had the primal courage to cry out like him. I am unable to soothe him. To tell him everything will be OK, because I'm not sure that's true.

I've not told anyone about the days of incessant racing thoughts and snakes of paranoia, the strangling anxiety and rampant insomnia. I'm embarrassed because it sounds 'strange', 'dramatic' and 'silly', but nothing is 'OK' any more.

The radio has been playing songs about me; the potted fig tree outside is trying to tell me something; and that teddy bear is watching me with CCTV eyes. Don't worry, I know this isn't good. It certainly isn't what I'd read about in the books and forums that promised this Golden Time of new motherhood would be the best moment of my life. So how can I say, out loud, that the day my son was born, and the brutal, postnatal, abstract hours since, have been the very worst days of my life? Stunned with fear and medical intervention and now whatever this is.

I ask my partner, Hugo, to take over the change, and head to the bathroom, only a 'voice' inside my head follows. 'What have you done?' it snarls. I look at myself in the mirror. I'm unrecognisable, haunted. Just days ago I was someone, a proper, established person with a loving family, friends, a career; now, I'm nobody. Oh God. I am mad. Is that really what's happening here?

Laura Dockrill began suffering with the severe mental illness postpartum psychosis after welcoming her son, Jet. 'No, I hadn't heard of it either until it tried to kill me,' she writes

'Six years on, I'm somehow grateful for the illness,' Laura Dockrill writes. 'I am a kinder, more empathetic, wiser person because of it.'

I had a baby and then I went mad.

This was February 2018, and it would be a week before I dared tell anyone what I was experiencing, two weeks before I began to feel suicidal and three weeks when I found myself waking up in a psychiatric hospital.

It turned out I was suffering with the severe mental illness postpartum psychosis (PP). No, I hadn't heard of it either until it tried to kill me. PP affects roughly one in 1,000 women every year, can occur — as in my case — 'out of the blue', and is considered a medical emergency.

Little is known about exactly how or what triggers the illness and so far little evidence to suggest it can be linked to a traumatic birth. The main symptoms are shame and guilt, so writing and talking about my experience has thrown darkness into the light.

Hugo and I had been together for less than a year when I fell pregnant at 31, but we'd been best friends for 17 years so it didn't seem premature. 'Do you think we're rushing into things?' we'd joke.

We couldn't wait to meet our little boy. I did all the 'right' things, dumped the wine and cheese and rested. Thankfully my pregnancy was kind to me; happy and healthy with no sickness. Hugo, a musician, and I, a freelance writer, saved and worked hard so we could take time off to be together once our son was born. We didn't overdo it on the research but we weren't naive either — we knew we were heading for a massive life change.

But no amount of preparation could have set us up for what was to happen and if it wasn't for all those years of friendship I don't think we would have survived it.

My labour was 24 hours of chaos and stress; long, sharp needles, poking fingers, violent hooks that resembled Victorian weapons of torture and lots of crying. Bleeping monitors, piercing alarms, changing midwives, a failed induction and bad news. The placenta had 'failed', meaning my baby was starving inside me. The umbilical cord wrapped — twice —around his neck, meaning as I pushed he was being strangled.

'I didn't deserve this beautiful baby boy waiting for me to step up and be his mum,' Ms Dockrill writes of how she felt when nurses asked how she was feeling

My unborn son was distressed, his scalp lacerated by the Victorian hook of torture and now there was meconium in the amniotic fluid, this presence of my son's first faeces a sign of his stress. I called for an emergency caesarean and within the hour a just-under-5lb flaming, red-faced baby was torn from my belly and plunged like Simba into the air — his angry, screwed-up face already stirring the dreaded 'Mum Guilt' in my tremoring heart.

He wanted to feed immediately. Only, my milk hadn't come in yet. I had nothing to offer him. I said, 'Hello Jet. I love you.' I'm sorry.

'Breast is best,' I was told and advised to stick at it. We spent days begging for my milk to flow to relieve our hungry son.

I was weak with fatigue, barely had the strength to hold Jet's tiny, delicate body against my chest, but I did, terrified of dropping him on the cold, hard hospital floor.

My scar raw and bloody, I still hadn't slept — couldn't. I became feral, filthy, a caged tiger; downing water straight from the jug, eating anything put in front of me, ripping meat from the bone like a Viking, all hands and teeth (I'm a vegetarian!) and, although never alone for a heartbeat, dangerously lonely.

Eventually, my milk came in. I was overjoyed. Jet gained weight and we were discharged. Home was the North Star, where everything would fall into place.

But things went from bad to worse; something other had returned with us. Something my family couldn't see. It was internal and menacing, that Sunday-night-before-school dread, hangover times-a-million, end of the world doom.

Outside a wild, freak-storm surrounded our flat; we were a snow globe shaken in the hands of a cyclops. In the rare snatches where I wasn't breastfeeding, I'd be wide awake, wired, checking for danger from my watchtower of the kitchen window. Manic and restless. Frantically fizzing. My blood pressure spiking.

Every passing police siren was for me; I'd been 'found out'. Overwhelmed by my medication timetable and Jet's routine feeding times — L breast, R breast, nap, nappy changes, sterilisations — the 24-hour clock was a riddle. Time either froze or accelerated at the speed of light. Even a minute's sleep would be consumed with a night terror so fierce I'd snap awake in panic — until I no longer knew the difference between nightmare and reality.

I felt I was awake every second of the day, staring at my son, wrapped in his blissful slumber, with both love and envy. 'I'm going to be too tired to care for him tomorrow,' I'd panic. 'What if I make a mistake?' I logged Jet's every move in sad little nonsense scrawls like the diaries of a stalker. I messaged friends with kids; 'It's hell,' they reassured, 'you won't sleep for the next 18 years — get used to it.'

I'd be momentarily pacified, but if everyone felt this bad, nobody would have a baby again! As the sleeplessness stacked up, my mind purring into overdrive, the delusions became louder; scarier. More persuasive. Harder to hide. The illness began to live in my eyes and fester.

Two weeks on from giving birth, I could no longer concentrate. I stopped eating and drinking. My brain, so overtaken with the illness, couldn't string a sentence together. And then, my milk dried up. This was unimaginably devastating for us all, but I knew it meant I had to get help. I said to Hugo: 'I need to see the doctor. I'm not OK.'

The GPs were patient and listened but failed to diagnose me. Had I a history of mental illness? No. Was I 'seeing' things? Hearing voices? Not exactly. The maternity nurse asked: 'Do you think you're God?'

This shocked me — I thought I was the total opposite. I didn't deserve this beautiful baby boy waiting for me to step up and be his mum.

Baby blues became PTSD. I was prescribed sleeping aids, diazepam, antihistamines. One medication I was given, the doctor said, 'is used to treat schizophrenia, but don't let that worry you'.

And that was it. I was off with my delusional diagnosis of secret schizophrenia. My brain would sprint catastrophic loops; what if Jet dies? What if I hurt him? I'm a bad mum.

I was prescribed antidepressants but was told they'd take six weeks to take effect. I thought: 'I haven't got six weeks. In fact, I'm not even sure I'll last the weekend.'

Jet was almost three weeks old when my mum and sister moved in, my living room resembling Glastonbury Festival. I thought they were here to care for Jet but, of course, they were here to care for me. This act of kindness only patronised and fuelled my suspicions.

I ruminated like an FBI agent doing overtime until: Bingo! Hugo was conspiring against me to take Jet; they all thought he'd be better off without me!

But I couldn't trust the professionals with this matter of confidentiality, so I'd stay awake, locked inside paranoid, delusional conspiracies, scheming about how I could escape Hugo with Jet.

Then I'd remember myself and be so disgusted and ashamed of my dark thoughts. With no way out of them, I quickly became suicidal.

I was that fearful of what I might do, conscious that I didn't want to cause further damage or harm to anyone. I told my sister that I couldn't take any more. That I didn't want to be alive. It was alarming how fast my illness escalated into an emergency scenario.

Asking for help was the bravest and best thing I've ever done.

With my father-in-law taking care of Jet, Hugo drove me to hospital that night. My sister held my hand in the back seat. As kids, driving through London at night used to be one of our favourite things to do; now we were both crying, petrified of the unknown.

Rock bottom was waking up on my first Mother's Day in a psychiatric hospital, separated from Jet, who was less than a month old, on 'suicide watch'. This meant a nurse had to watch me sleep.

That's where I was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. Although surreal, I felt great relief to be diagnosed, to know it wasn't just something in my head that I'd 'invented' and that I would recover. I remember my doctor saying: 'You're going to go back to being a mum and writing books again.'

I didn't believe him in a million years, but look, here I am.

I stayed at the hospital for two weeks, my hours monitored and punctuated with medication and group therapy.

Hugo would bring Jet to see me every evening. I felt so guilty that I wasn't at home but I knew I had to get better. Still, recovery wasn't linear. I thought, once home, everything would fall into place, but it just felt like returning to the scene of my unravelling. In a way, I was a newborn myself; I had to learn to sleep and be in the world again, taking one step at a time.

But with support from loved ones, bonding with my son and working with the life-saving organisation APP (Action on Postpartum Psychosis), of which I am now a proud ambassador, I began to see that recovery was possible. Nobody gives you a medal for getting better — there is no finish line. One day you just find yourself laughing freely at the TV. Wanting to put make-up on. Pushing your baby in a pram and thinking: 'OK, I've got this.'

Jet's first word was 'Mama'. I remember looking at him thinking: 'Oh my word, you're beautiful, I love you. I actually properly love you.'

For Jet's first birthday we took a spontaneous Eurostar to Paris. Everything felt laced in gold that day. The sun shone like honey, the sky was sapphire blue. The hotel gave us an upgrade to the best room for no reason. We all pretended to be cool about it and then jumped on the massive bed laughing.

It was like Jet was in on it all. Like he knew it was special. We couldn't believe our luck. I've never held on so tight to any feeling.

Six years on, I'm somehow grateful for the illness. I am a kinder, more empathetic, wiser person because of it. I talk to my son about mental health. I feel grateful for small things and don't take my health for granted. Mental illness doesn't discriminate and nobody is immune.

Loved ones are crucial in the early days after childbirth. They can tell if somebody is not being themselves. If you're worried for yourself or someone you love, don't hide in silence.

Hugo and I always thought we'd have more kids but there is a 50 per cent chance of me experiencing PP again. One of the things I am grateful for is that Jet was too young to remember me so unwell. I couldn't risk that. I'm not disappointed that I cannot have more children. My family is complete, because I am alive to be a part of it. I am lucky to have Jet; I didn't make him, he made me.

Grey by Laura Dockrill, a picture book about feelings illustrated by Lauren Child, is out today (£14.99, Walker).

Laura Dockrill is judging The Women's Prize for Fiction 2024. The winner will be announced on June 13. More info can be found at womensprize.com.