Post-partum Mood Change in Jamaican Women: A Description and Discussion on its Significance

Extract

Notwithstanding Hamilton's remark that childbirth is responsible for a great deal of neurotic illness, the literature is heavily weighted in favour of studies of puerperal psychosis, even though this condition occurs in only one in a thousand births. Since the milder forms of illness tend to pass unrecognized they are often responsible for stress in the individual and family; thus it is right and proper that more attention has recently been paid to these. Pitt (1968), for example, found an incidence of 10–17 per cent of atypical depression and psychosomatic illness that persisted for several weeks and in some cases for as long as one year following childbirth. Between normality and psychotic or neurotic illness lies the mild affective disorder that so often characterizes pregnancy and the early Puerperium, but does not amount to an ‘illness'. Perhaps because women regard it as an expected hazard from which they will recover it has not generally been considered to merit serious study. Jarrahi-Zadeh et al. (1969) looked at this and found that as many as 55 per cent had one or more depressive symptoms during pregnancy. If anything it was less common post-partum, and they furnished evidence for a brain syndrome of mild degree occurring at this time. Yalom et al. (1968) have described the post-partum blues syndrome as occurring in 66 per cent of their subjects and hold it to be a self-limiting condition of only a few days duration. It is likely that patients with the blues have a greater risk of developing a neurotic depression, which might reflect upon personality factors, but the same cannot be said to hold for post-partum psychosis.