Babies being swapped at birth is a persistent urban legend, and like the best horror stories it has roots in fact. There’s the Austrian woman who discovered, at 22 years old, that her mother and father were not her biological parents. The two families in Assam, India, whose newborns were given to the wrong mothers. And a French woman who took someone else’s baby home. It’s true. Doctors and nurses who hold lives in their hands sometimes make mistakes.
The GP-turned-writer Susi Fox’s psychological thriller Mine teases out this nightmare and uses it to explore cultural anxieties about birth and hospitals. Fox examines the dark side of motherhood – mental illness, failure, violent thoughts – and refuses to look away.
Mine’s protagonist, Sasha, wakes up beneath fluoro lights. Her stomach bears the wounds of a caesarean but there’s no sign of her baby. Her husband is absent. When the harried nurse finally takes her to a tiny infant in a humidicrib, Sasha knows with chilling certainty that this isn’t her baby.
Fox, a doctor for 16 years, divides her time between clinics in New Gisborne and Fitzroy. She told Guardian Australia that Mine was inspired by a particularly haunting dream.
“I was holding a baby in my arms and showing the baby to a group of faceless people. I was saying to them: ‘This is not my baby.’ They all turned away. They didn’t believe me. It was profoundly unsettling.”
After going to a writer’s clinic for doctors, the story “took on a life of its own”. The resulting novel is disorienting, throwing into question the sanity of the narrator, the trustworthiness of doctors and the reader’s understanding of right and wrong.
“Not being believed is a frightening place to be,” Fox says. “It plays into the whole #MeToo movement: when women speak up, they’re often not heard.”
She is calm, measured. Evidence of gender bias in the medical system is well-documented. Women’s pain is often dismissed. A study, The Girl Who Cried Pain, revealed that “women who seek help are less likely than men to be taken seriously”. Endometriosis, in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus and can cause chronic pain, takes seven to eight years to diagnose.
While things are changing, Fox says the androcentric way medicine is studied and taught affects how doctors assess their patients.
“In heart disease, for example, the traditional presentation of chest pain is taken from men’s experience,” she says. “Women’s pain is seen as ‘atypical’ so women are already presented as the other.”
Mine also touches on the horror of historical sexism in the medical industry.
“Women were being locked up in psychiatric institutions due to hysteria,” says Fox, referring to the diagnosis, born of the Greek word for womb, hystera, that came of age in the Victorian era.
Attributed to women who exhibited sleeplessness, irritability and anxiety, it was treated by doctors by manually stimulating patients to orgasm – or by confinement. In Mine, when Sasha rejects the infant that is supposedly hers, she is diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, voluntarily admitted to the psychiatric ward, plied with sedatives and treated with suspicion.
Mine also explores the taboo of the bad mother. As Sasha paces, trembling, through surreal hospital hallways and into a ghoulishly lit premature nursery, she encounters women who certainly don’t fit the saintly image of motherhood. She befriends Ondine, a woman who tried to hold her son underwater to finally stop him crying – before her husband intervened.
Fox has met many women with similar burdens. A doctor’s surgery can function as the last resort for desperate people, where anxieties and secrets tumble out.
“GPs and psychologists are the modern-day priests,” she says. “People come to confess.”
It is not the job of doctors, though, to judge. Fox is comfortable with silence, and is careful choosing her words. When she talks about a local mothers’ group she got to know as a junior doctor in regional Victoria, it’s easy to imagine her in her role as confidante.
“One [mother] would come in and say, ‘I’m not sleeping, I’m not doing well – but everyone else in my mothers’ group is doing fine.’ Then, that afternoon, a different mother from the same group would come in and say the same thing. The next day, a different mother, but again the same complaint!
“I was trying to show in the book that women aren’t so alone in things,” Fox says about the multiple ways – from depression to violent thoughts – that extreme stress manifests for mothers.
A traumatic birth, or the alienation humidicribs can create when treating premature infants, can increase the risk of postnatal mental illness, Fox says.
“Postpartum psychosis is a rare condition that affects one in 1,000 women. It presents quite quickly after birth with delusions – ideas that are not based in reality – and hallucinations, so seeing or hearing things.”
While postpartum psychosis is rare, postnatal depression is far more common, experienced by one in seven women who give birth in Australia each year.
Fox hopes to weaken the taboos surrounding motherhood’s dark side.
“It’s not uncommon at all for women to have ideas about hurting your baby,” she says. “It’s a frightening experience but no one talks about it. I want to shine the light on things that aren’t spoken about.”
• Mine by Susi Fox will be published on 2 April by Penguin Random House Australia and on 14 June by Penguin Random House UK
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the UK Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
