Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T08:53:46.346Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

J. R. T. Davidson*
Affiliation:
Formerly of the Department of Psychiatry, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston 7, Jamaica, West Indies

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.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1972 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Clarke, E. (1953). My Mother who Fathered Me. Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Dalton, K. (1971). ‘Prospective study into puerperal depression.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 118, 689–92.Google Scholar
Jarrahi-Zadeh, A., et al. (1969). ‘Emotional and cognitive changes in pregnancy and the early puerperium.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 115, 797806.Google Scholar
Kerr, M. (1952). Personality and Conflict in Jamaica. Collins-Sangster.Google Scholar
Lerner, B. A. (1970). ‘Contraception and the poverty syndrome.’ A.P.A. Annual Meeting, San MFrancisco. Google Scholar
Meyerson, B. J. (1964). ‘Estrus behaviour in rats.’ Psychopharmacologia, 6, 210–18.Google Scholar
Meyerson, B. J. (1964). ‘The effects of neuropharmacological agents in hormone activated estrus behaviour in oophorectomized rats.’ Arch. intern. Pharmacodyn. Google Scholar
Pitt, B. (1968). ‘Atypical depression following childbirth.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 114, 1325–36.Google Scholar
Reynolds, E. H., et al. (1970). ‘Folate deficiency in depressive illness.’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 117, 287–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Treadway, R., et al. (1969). ‘A psychoendocrine study of pregnancy and the puerperium.’ Amer. Journal Psychiat., 125, 10.Google Scholar
Yalom, I., et al. (1968). ‘Post-partum blues syndrome: a description and related variables.’ Arch. gen. Psychiat., 18, 1627.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Submit a response

eLetters

No eLetters have been published for this article.