A Conversation with Yollanda Zhang on Motherhood, Living with Bipolar Disorder, and Her New Book

Q: Thank you for sharing your story with PSI. Will you tell us about your pregnancy and postpartum experience?

Yollanda: I had been living with Bipolar I disorder for more than a decade by the time I became pregnant with my daughter. I knew pregnancy carried additional risks, so I worked closely with my psychiatrist and went into it feeling prepared. What I wasn’t prepared for was developing severe psychosis during my pregnancy and being admitted to a Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).

It was quite terrifying. I lost touch with reality at a time when I had expected to be preparing joyfully to become a mother, especially after experiencing two pregnancy losses. Fortunately, the psychosis subsided after a few days. However, after my daughter was born, I fell into a severe postpartum depression. I remember looking at this beautiful baby I had wanted so much and feeling devastated that I couldn’t experience motherhood the way I thought I was supposed to.

There was also tremendous fear underneath it all. I worried about whether I could be a good mother while living with bipolar disorder. I worried that my daughter might inherit it. And because I had grown up in a culture and family where mental illness carried so much shame and stigma, I didn’t feel that I could openly talk about what had happened to me.

My daughter is now a teenager, and I wish I could go back and tell that frightened new mother that this chapter was not going to define the rest of her life or the kind of mother she would become.

Q: Today, you are very open about your experience, but that wasn’t always the case. Will you share with us what changed?

Yollanda: For many years, almost no one knew I had bipolar disorder. I had been diagnosed at 20, and I carried that secret for two decades. I built businesses, became a teacher, got married, became a mother, and appeared very capable from the outside. But there was always this part of me I believed I had to hide. Eventually, hiding became more painful than being seen.

I began sharing my story publicly during the COVID pandemic, when I saw how many people were suffering. Around that time, a dear friend died by suicide. I began to realize how much shame depends on silence. Every time I shared a little more of my story, I felt some of that shame lift. And when people came up to me after a talk or interview to tell me they saw themselves in my story or felt less alone, I realized that sharing wasn’t only healing something in me. It could help someone else, too.

Motherhood changed this for me, too. I started asking myself what I was teaching my daughter if I treated part of myself as something shameful. I didn’t want her to inherit my shame, even if she never inherited my illness.

Over time, what I had spent years hiding became part of my advocacy. Today, I can say openly that I live with Bipolar I disorder. Not because it is the most important thing about me, but because I no longer believe it is something I need to hide. That’s partly why I decided to write my book, Dear Younger Me^®: Becoming the Hero I Needed.

Q: How did your cultural background affect your struggle with bipolar disorder?

Yollanda: I grew up in a Chinese immigrant family where preserving face was incredibly important. Mental illness wasn’t something we talked about openly. There was a powerful message, spoken and unspoken, that difficult things should remain private, especially anything that might bring shame to the family.

So when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I didn’t just have to make sense of the illness itself. I had to make sense of what I believed the diagnosis said about me. I became very good at appearing successful and high-functioning while keeping enormous parts of my life hidden.

I’ve come to understand that some of what I experienced wasn’t unique to my family. There can be tremendous pressure in many Asian families to succeed, endure, not burden other people, and keep painful experiences within the family. Those values can come from love and survival, but they can also make asking for help incredibly difficult.

Part of my healing has been learning that I can honour where I come from without carrying forward everything I inherited from it. That distinction has become central to both my work and the way I mother my daughter.

Q: Tell us about your nonprofit, Girl. Strong.

Yollanda: Girl. Strong. grew out of my desire to give girls some of the emotional tools I wish I had when I was younger. It was also born from grief—I lost my maternal grandmother, who raised me from birth to nearly 4 years old, to pancreatic cancer. She always valued education, but never had access to it herself because she was married at a very young age. I wanted to honour her memory by creating more opportunities for girls to build confidence, resilience, healthy relationships, and a stronger sense of self.

At the time, I thought I was creating something for the next generation. Looking back, I can see that I was also beginning to explore questions that were deeply personal to me: How do we help girls trust themselves? How do we teach them that their worth isn’t dependent on achievement or other people’s approval? How do we give them language for what they’re feeling before they learn to silence themselves?

These questions eventually followed me into my graduate training in counseling psychology, my book, and into the clinical work I do today. In many ways, Girl. Strong. was an early expression of something that has become a much larger part of my life’s work: helping people develop the self-understanding and emotional safety that many of us didn’t receive when we were young.

Q: Will you share how what you went through during pregnancy and the postpartum period, as well as your work today, affects your relationship with your daughter?

Yollanda: My relationship with my daughter is probably where all of this becomes most meaningful to me.

For a long time, I was afraid that my mental illness would somehow make me a worse mother. Today, I think some of what I’ve lived through has made me a much more intentional one.

As I’ve done my own healing, I’ve become increasingly aware of what gets passed from one generation to the next—not only genetically, but emotionally. Our fears, expectations, perfectionism, shame, and unhealed wounds can all enter our relationships with our children, even when we desperately want to do things differently.

I can’t protect my daughter from every hurt, and I certainly don’t get motherhood right all the time. But I can take responsibility for my own healing. I can apologize when I get something wrong. I can listen when her experience is different from mine. And I can keep reminding myself that she is not here to become the person I think she should be.

One of my deepest motivations has been to become the kind of mother who doesn’t require her daughter to abandon herself in order to stay closely connected.

That has probably been one of the greatest gifts—and responsibilities—of my own healing.

Q: Tell us about your upcoming book, Dear Younger Me^®, publishing in 2027.

Yollanda: Dear Younger Me^® is the book I wish I could have given myself many years ago.

It grew out of my own journey of looking back at the younger versions of myself with more compassion: the little girl who learned to adapt in order to feel loved, the young woman diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 20, the frightened mother experiencing psychosis during pregnancy, and all the versions of me who believed they simply needed to try harder. In the book, I travel back in time through imagined conversations of these younger versions of myself. I also write letters into the future to my daughter, sharing what I hope she’ll know should she experience some of life’s toughest challenges.

The book uses the Japanese art of Kintsugi—the practice of repairing broken pottery with gold—as a central metaphor. Rather than pretending our broken places never existed, what happens when we understand them, tend to them, and allow them to become part of a stronger, more honest whole?

I wrote about mental illness, motherhood, generational trauma, cultural conditioning, family relationships, and what it means to understand where our parents came from without denying the impact of what happened to us.

At its heart, though, Dear Younger Me^® is about love and connection as survival forces. It is about learning to offer ourselves some of the compassion, protection, and understanding we may have spent our lives seeking from other people—and then choosing more consciously what we carry forward to the next generation.

Q: If you could give one piece of (solicited) advice to a new mother struggling with her mental health, what would you tell her?

Yollanda: Please don’t use how you feel right now as evidence of what kind of mother you are going to be.

When I was severely depressed postpartum, I couldn’t imagine a future in which I would feel differently. Mental illness can make the present feel permanent. It isn’t.

Let people help you. Tell someone how you’re actually doing, not how you think you’re supposed to be doing. And if the first person doesn’t understand the seriousness of what you’re experiencing, tell someone else. Keep advocating for yourself, because you’re worth advocating for.

You do not have to feel joyful every moment to love your baby deeply. You do not have to do motherhood perfectly to be a good mother. Sometimes taking care of yourself is one of the most loving things you can do for your child.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Yollanda: I think I would want mothers—and especially mothers who come from cultures or families where mental illness is difficult to talk about—to know that silence doesn’t have to be the price of belonging.

For years, I believed there were parts of my story that made me less worthy: my diagnosis, my hospitalizations, the psychosis I experienced during pregnancy, the depression that followed, and the struggles within my family. I understand those experiences very differently today.

I survived them—I’m still surviving them. I learned from them. And now, as a mental health advocate and Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), I have the extraordinary privilege of sitting on the other side of the room with people who are trying to make sense of their own pain.

I know what it is like to be the mother who is terrified that she will never feel like herself again. And I now know what it is like to sit with another person and hold hope for them when they can’t yet hold it for themselves.

If sharing my story helps even one mother feel less ashamed or less alone, then all those years I spent believing I had to hide this part of myself have been transformed into something meaningful.

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Interview conducted by Postpartum Support International’s Samantha Reaves, MA, PMH-C.

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Explore these PSI Resources:   

Bipolar Support for Moms and Birthing People
Postpartum Psychosis Information and Resources
Learn More about Perinatal Mental Health
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