Post Partum Psychosis More Common than Thought

The news about post partum psychosis is not encouraging. In an examination of medical records, Danish researchers found that as many as one in a thousand women suffer from Post Partum Psychosis in the year after giving birth. The results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association quantified the cases of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression or another psychotic condition requiring hospitalization.
Released on Wednesday, the study was accompanied by an editorial calling for universal screening programs to check all new mothers for mental illness. It is an editorial that couldn’t have come at a better time. In writing this blog, I follow newspaper headlines around the world and I cannot count the number of mother-child murder-suicides where PPP has been cited as a cause. However, a screening program needs to be followed up with action. There is nothing worse than identifying a new mother with a mental illness and then doing nothing to help her and the family involved. Fathers and other family members must remain vigilant in the months after a woman gives birth to ensure mental illnesses are addressed by the medical community.
According to a report in the Chicago Tribune, the study helps bring attention to under-recognised illnesses that put both women and their infants at risk of harm.

• The results underscore the potential for danger after childbirth, when a sharp drop in levels of key hormones like estrogen and progesterone may trigger mental disorders in susceptible women, said the article by Ronald Kotulak.

  “We’ve had a difficult time figuring out what causes postpartum psychiatric illnesses, and I see this study as really strongly supporting a biologic, hormonal or other physical basis,” said Dr. Valerie Davis-Raskin, a former associate clinical professor at the University of Chicago who treats patients with postpartum depression.

Postpartum psychosis, it must be repeated, is not the baby blues or the “postpartum let down” up to 80% of women experience after giving birth. It is an extreme reaction to the new state of motherhood that triggers the onset of another mental disorder. Hormones obviously play a big role, but we do know that other people with pre-existing mental illnesses also prone to experience a relapse of psychosis when they are sleep-deprived, under nourished, experience physical trauma or find themselves in a new and stressful situation.