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THE STRESS RISKS INVOLVED IN PREGNANCY: POSTPARTUM DEPRESSION

Depending on the particular study you read, between 20 and 65 percent of childbearing women report maternity blues. Since postpartum (after-the-birth) depression rarely begins before the third day after delivery, it seems clear that hormonal and chemical changes are involved. But psychological stresses also play an important role.

Psychologically stressful changes begin with delivery. The woman is separated from her husband and family except during visiting hours. She is often separated from her baby except during feeding hours. Soon the new mother feels isolated, vulnerable, and incapacitated. Her first days at home with the baby can make things worse. Mary remembers:

I was totally prepared for natural childbirth, and totally unprepared for natural child-rearing. Despite my twenty years of formal education, I did not know how to sterilize a bottle without melting the rubber nipples. By the end of the week, every time my baby cried, I cried, too.

Teenage mothers struggle with further stresses after delivery. Becoming a mother may have solved an identity crisis, but it also may have created new ones: loss of freedom, of mobility, and of choice, and mixed feelings about parenting and its responsibilities.

Some women don't feel the baby blues until they have their second or third child. As Dora, who has four children, put it, "It is hard to see myself as pretty, witty, and wise, when I feel more like the old woman who lived in a shoe, and had so many children that she didn't know what to do!"

The postpartum depression should lift as the new mother rejoins her support system, sees that she can handle things, and finds that her body chemistry readjusts. Sometimes it does not. As with some other Female Stress Syndrome symptoms, professional intervention may be necessary to break the mind-body chain of events producing, in this case, the depression.

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