“I used to be someone else”postpartum identity and invisible labor among urban mothers in Chennai, an interpretative phenomenological study

J. Priyadharshini, R. K. Jaishree Karthiga•View original
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The biomedical framing of postpartum distress has a blind spot, and Priyadharshini and Karthiga's 2025 study names it directly. Clinical frameworks locate maternal suffering in hormonal disruption or psychiatric diagnosis. This paper locates it in gendered systems, including unequal domestic labor, intensive mothering norms, emotional invisibility, and intergenerational judgment. That's not a minor adjustment. It's a different theory of causation entirely. The method is interpretative phenomenological analysis or IPA. Smith and colleagues describe it as a double hermeneutic: the researcher interprets how each participant interprets her own experience. It's idiographic by design, focusing on small, deep samples rather than large generalizable cohorts. The sampling funnel here started with sixty-two Google Forms screening responses. Nine met inclusion criteria. Five agreed to full interviews lasting sixty to ninety minutes each. All five were urban Chennai mothers, aged twenty-five to thirty-five, currently employed or formerly employed, selected through maximum variation criteria to capture diversity in socioeconomic status, employment history, and family structure. What interpretative phenomenological analysis captures that a scale cannot is tone, silences, and embodied meaning. The trade-off is depth over generalizability — the authors are candid about that. What the five women described clusters into five interlocking themes: rupture of professional self-concept, role overload as a cognitive and mental load, emotional invisibility, pervasive guilt, and internalized ideals of perfect motherhood. The quotes are raw. Rekha, who had been a Chief Operating Officer, describes her erosion this way: "I slowly gave up my role… I didn't even realize when I stopped being that person." Another participant names the asymmetry of recognition: "My husband's praised for doing the bare minimum… He'll do it only if I say. Why cannot he think of it himself?" Guilt tracked every decision — returning to work, limits on breastfeeding, a child's developmental delay. Here is the finding that sharpens the paper's argument: this distress persisted even when nominal support was present. Partners existed. Workplaces offered flexibility. And yet the asymmetry of caregiving labor remained staggering. The authors frame this using Hochschild's second shift concept and Daminger's mental load framework. Policies like parental leave or flexible scheduling don't touch the structural, gendered inequities that sustain invisible labor. Support, as currently defined, isn't the same as equity. Priyadharshini and Karthiga peg postpartum depression prevalence in Chennai at roughly nineteen to twenty-five percent, and point out that both India's National Mental Health Programme and the Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child, and Adolescent Health program emphasize physical maternal mortality while maternal mental health indicators are absent from National Family Health Survey five data entirely. Their reframing connects directly to Sustainable Development Goal three point four and the World Health Organization's call to integrate perinatal mental health into maternal and child health services. The study is limited — five educated, cisgender, Tamil-speaking urban participants don't represent the range of postpartum experiences. But the methodological challenge it poses is transferable: if we keep measuring postpartum distress as a clinical event happening inside individual women, we will keep missing the structural conditions that produce it.

The biomedical framing of postpartum distress has a blind spot, and Priyadharshini and Karthiga's 2025 study names it directly. Clinical frameworks locate maternal suffering in hormonal disruption or psychiatric diagnosis. This paper locates it in gendered systems, including unequal domestic labor, intensive mothering norms, emotional invisibility, and intergenerational judgment. That's not a minor adjustment. It's a different theory of causation entirely.

The method is interpretative phenomenological analysis or IPA. Smith and colleagues describe it as a double hermeneutic: the researcher interprets how each participant interprets her own experience. It's idiographic by design, focusing on small, deep samples rather than large generalizable cohorts.

The sampling funnel here started with sixty-two Google Forms screening responses. Nine met inclusion criteria. Five agreed to full interviews lasting sixty to ninety minutes each.

All five were urban Chennai mothers, aged twenty-five to thirty-five, currently employed or formerly employed, selected through maximum variation criteria to capture diversity in socioeconomic status, employment history, and family structure. What interpretative phenomenological analysis captures that a scale cannot is tone, silences, and embodied meaning. The trade-off is depth over generalizability — the authors are candid about that.

What the five women described clusters into five interlocking themes: rupture of professional self-concept, role overload as a cognitive and mental load, emotional invisibility, pervasive guilt, and internalized ideals of perfect motherhood. The quotes are raw. Rekha, who had been a Chief Operating Officer, describes her erosion this way: "I slowly gave up my role… I didn't even realize when I stopped being that person." Another participant names the asymmetry of recognition: "My husband's praised for doing the bare minimum… He'll do it only if I say.

Why cannot he think of it himself?" Guilt tracked every decision — returning to work, limits on breastfeeding, a child's developmental delay.

Here is the finding that sharpens the paper's argument: this distress persisted even when nominal support was present. Partners existed. Workplaces offered flexibility.

And yet the asymmetry of caregiving labor remained staggering. The authors frame this using Hochschild's second shift concept and Daminger's mental load framework. Policies like parental leave or flexible scheduling don't touch the structural, gendered inequities that sustain invisible labor. Support, as currently defined, isn't the same as equity.

Priyadharshini and Karthiga peg postpartum depression prevalence in Chennai at roughly nineteen to twenty-five percent, and point out that both India's National Mental Health Programme and the Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child, and Adolescent Health program emphasize physical maternal mortality while maternal mental health indicators are absent from National Family Health Survey five data entirely. Their reframing connects directly to Sustainable Development Goal three point four and the World Health Organization's call to integrate perinatal mental health into maternal and child health services.

The study is limited — five educated, cisgender, Tamil-speaking urban participants don't represent the range of postpartum experiences. But the methodological challenge it poses is transferable: if we keep measuring postpartum distress as a clinical event happening inside individual women, we will keep missing the structural conditions that produce it.