New moms should be screened for depression, the government (finally) says
Hippocrates was the first to see maternal mental illnesses
A US government panel on Tuesday finally acknowledged what many mental health care providers and pregnant women have argued for a long time: Postpartum depression is a thing. An actual, real thing that needs more attention.
The panel of experts convened by the Department of Health and Human Services recommended, for the first time, that all pregnant women and those who have recently given birth be screened for depression — a current requirement only in one state, New Jersey.
The recommendation validates the seriousness of a disorder that drives some women toward suicidal thoughts and debilitating anxiety, but one that’s been dismissed as “baby blues” since the time of Hippocrates in 700 BC. Now, that’s changing — thanks, at least in part, to some prominent moms, and some wrenching cases of postpartum depression that have driven women to kill themselves, taking their babies with them.
Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine,wrote that women suffered from mood swings after giving birth, but it took more than 2,000 years before some doctors started taking it seriously. It wasn’t until 1850 that postpartum depression was diagnosed as a disorder — to the extent that it was diagnosed at all.
Roughly one in seven women is estimated to suffer from postpartum depression, but historically they’ve been reluctant to share their symptoms out of concern they’d be viewed as hysterical or worse: bad mothers.
In recent years, though, evidence has emerged suggesting that postpartum depression is more common than previously thought, and that failing to treat it has serious consequences for mothers and their children. At the same time, the public has become more willing to countenance the idea that pregnant women and new mothers might need some serious help, largely because celebrity moms became more outspoken about battling the disorder.
The actress Lisa Rinna described asking her husband, Harry Hamlin, to put away all their sharp knives. Brooke Shields wrote, in a New York Times op-ed: “At my lowest points, I thought of swallowing a bottle of pills or jumping out the window of my apartment.”
Shields, famously, found relief through therapy and antidepressants, a strategy that Tom Cruise, yet more famously, attacked as “irresponsible.”
Other actresses, including Courteney Cox-Arquette and Gwyneth Paltrow, later followed in Shields’s footsteps, speaking or writing publicly about their own battles.
Shields wrote, in 2005, “If any good can come of Mr. Cruise’s ridiculous rant, let’s hope that it gives much-needed attention to a serious disease. Perhaps now is the time to call on doctors, particularly obstetricians and pediatricians, to screen for postpartum depression.”
More than a decade later, government experts have at last made their case.
Want to deepen your understanding of the news?
Follow Timeline on Medium
