New Findings on Timing and Range of Maternal Mental Illness
Postpartum depression isn’t always postpartum. It isn’t even always depression. A fast-growing body of research is changing the very definition of maternal mental illness, showing that it is more common and varied than previously thought.
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A complex interplay of genes, stress and hormones causes maternal mental illness, scientists say. “Hormones go up more than a hundredfold,” said Dr. Margaret Spinelli, the director of the Women’s Program in Columbia University’s psychiatry department. After birth, hormones plummet, a roller coaster that can “disrupt brain chemistry,” she said.Continue reading the main story
Some women are genetically predisposed to react intensely to hormone changes. And some are more sensitive to stresses like difficulties with family, finances, childbirth or parenting.Maternal mental illness is not new. It was recognized as early as the fifth century B.C., when Hippocrates proposed that fluid from the uterus could flow to the head after childbirth and cause delirium. In the Middle Ages, mothers with such symptoms were viewed as witches or victims of witchcraft. In the 1920s, one Freudian-inspired theory attributed these mood disorders to frigidity, suppressed homosexuality or incestuous urges..
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