The blood dripping from the bathroom faucet was the first sign that something was wrong. A few days later, Alexandra Hardie saw cockroaches scuttle from beneath the bed. Soon, she noticed spiders crawling up the wall.
One day in May 2016, four months after giving birth to her first child, Ms. Hardie began shouting that the devil was in the room. She became so agitated that she smashed a bottle of red wine on the floor of her Edinburgh apartment. Her husband, James, called 999, Britain’s emergency number. He pinned his wife, who was threatening to harm herself, to the floor to prevent her from grabbing a kitchen knife.
A few hours later, Mr. Hardie was driving his wife and infant daughter to a specialized psychiatric ward, where Ms. Hardie would remain for nearly six months as a team of psychiatrists, nurses, therapists and social workers treated her for postpartum psychosis, a psychiatric disorder that can cause hallucinations and delusional thoughts, often centered on a woman’s child. This rare condition is thought to be caused by a combination of genetics, sleep deprivation and biological changes after childbirth.
But the center, a type of facility known as a mother-and-baby unit, also did something that no psychiatric wards in the United States would do: It allowed Ms. Hardie, who had experienced thoughts of wanting to drown her newborn, to keep caring for her baby as she received treatment, under careful supervision.