Melanie Blocker Stokes wanted to be a mother more than anything else in life. Melanie, a 41 year-old Chicago native and pharmaceutical sales manager, believed motherhood was her life mission and fiercely wanted a daughter of her own, even after she was told by doctors that she could never conceive.

This is the Melanie who her loved ones want to remember. Not the tortured soul who, on an early Monday morning in June - 3 1/2 months after giving birth to her first child -plunged 12 stories from the tiny window ledge of a Chicago hotel as firefighters pleaded with her not to jump.

Melanie’s suicide, and her uncharacteristic behavior in the months following the birth of her daughter, Sommer Skyy, were the result of postpartum psychosis - the most severe, yet most rare, postpartum psychiatric disorder marked by delusions and hallucinations, severe insomnia, extreme anxiety, paranoia, suicidal or homicidal thoughts and depression.

Melanie’s husband, Dr. Sam Stokes, 34, a surgeon at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, first noticed something was amiss with Melanie about five weeks after she gave birth. “You expect your wife to be really tired and really worn out from feeding a newborn every two hours,” he says. “The difficulty comes in knowing just how much of that is normal for having a new baby and how much is depression.”

“It’s a monster that enters their brains,” say Melanie’s mother, Carol Blocker, 63, a fifth-grade teacher in Chicago. “She told me, ‘You have no idea what’s going on inside my brain.‘ Her thought process became different. She didn’t talk about the baby. She talked about hopelessness.”

Mrs. Blocker says that Melanie initially asked her not to tell Sam about her depression. “She felt she wouldn’t be a good wife for Sam,” Mrs. Blocker reveals. “She felt Sam would leave her because her looks were changing. She felt she was a bad mother. She said the baby ruined her life.”

As Melanie’s depression deepened into severe psychosis, her family had her hospitalized four times. During the entire ordeal, she stopped eating and drinking. Her behavior grew more erratic. At one point after she was released, she wandered out of her house at 3 a.m. and went to Chicago’s lakefront. Another time she asked a neighbor if he owned a gun. She became fixated with windows and would remove the screens and stare outside.

She was given anti-depressants, anti-psychotic drugs, electroconvulsive (shock) therapy, as well as counseling. She would improve only to spiral downward yet again.

During one hospital stay, Mrs. Blocker said she found her daughter balled up in a chair, as if in a trance, writing “I am a living corpse and I am walking the earth.”

“I couldn’t penetrate her,” Mrs. Blocker says.

But then Melanie made a turn for the better. During her fourth and last hospital stay during the Memorial Day weekend, she had gained weight. She was smiling more and asking to see her daughter. She even wrote out a plan for recovery. Melanie was released about five days later. Her doctors and family believed the worst was over. They were wrong.

On June 7, just one week after she was released, Sam left home for an early meeting, promising Melanie he would soon return. She was eating breakfast, a good sign, and looked forward to spending the day with him. It was the last time he saw his wife.

Melanie called her mother that morning to say her final goodbye.

“She told me I was the best mother in the world, that she truly loved me with all her heart, and to rear Sommer just like I reared her.” Mrs. Blocker recalls.

Melanie then left the house. Her family aided by authorities, tried to find her. Four days later, she committed suicide.

The monster had won.

The loss of Melanie is still raw in the family’s heart. Mrs. Blocker says she misses her daily phone chats with her daughter and best friend. She plans to create a book filled with memories of Melanie, which she’ll give to Sommer when she’s old enough so she will know the kind of person her mother was before her illness - the true Melanie.

Sam Stokes says the most important lesson he wants people to take from his wife’s tragedy is that childbirth is “just the tip of the iceberg.” Don’t take postpartum depression lightly,” he warns. “It could be devastating.”


Excerpts from this article were taken from "Suicide: One Mother's Tragic Story of Battle With Depression," by Nicole Walker for Jet magazine.