Additional information
by Stephanie Hanson (Author), Hector Curriel (Illustrator)
Some books inform. This one bears witness.
You Are My Reason is an illustrated poem for parents navigating the emotional terrain of postpartum depression and perinatal mood disorders - and for everyone who loves them. Written in an intimate first-person voice, it traces the full arc of one parent's experience: the dream of joyful new parenthood, the disorienting arrival of darkness instead, and the hard-won decision to ask for help.
What sets this book apart is what it refuses to do. It doesn't minimize. It doesn't rush to reassurance. It sits with the heaviness of loving a baby while feeling nothing - and names that experience without shame, without clinical distance, and without asking the reader to be further along than she is.
Hector Curriel's paintings - richly textured, emotionally precise - carry the story beyond language. A mother folded over a crib, tissue box in hand. A parent climbing hand over hand out of darkness, baby held close, a circle of light above. These images do what words alone cannot: they make the invisible visible.
Deliberately diverse in its illustrations, the book reflects what research confirms - postpartum mood disorders cross every line of race, culture, and identity. No reader is left outside this story.
Grounded in clinical expertise and human truth in equal measure, You Are My Reason is a first-contact tool for the space between suffering in silence and saying the words out loud. It closes with current, tiered crisis resources and a message that is both simple and necessary: you are not alone, help is real, and asking for it is an act of love.
For perinatal mental health providers, hospital systems, birth workers, and anyone who has ever held a baby and wondered why they couldn't feel what they were supposed to feel.
