Transcript
Announcer:
This is Advances in Women’s Health on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Erin Henshaw, a licensed clinical psychologist and a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Denison University in Ohio. She’ll be discussing how we can recognize postpartum depression in women who are breastfeeding. Let’s hear from Dr. Henshaw now.
Dr. Henshaw:
We can look at typical breastfeeding challenges and postpartum depression as two ends of a continuum. On the one end of the continuum, we can say typical breastfeeding challenges might involve some frustration; some solvable problems; some things that might be able to be managed by education, practice, or support; or experiences of sadness, guilt, or frustration that come and go but take up a small part of the woman's day.
When we think about depression, we're looking at something that has more time and more intensity, so persistent low mood, feeling this way most of the day, many days in a row. And we also might see, instead of low mood, just a lack of interest or pleasure or joy in any of the things that they're doing. Either a low mood or a lack of emotion and feeling related to positive events—each of these can be a sign that something is moving beyond just a frustration with breastfeeding into a sign of potential postpartum depression.
We have some really good screening tools. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, or EPDS, has been validated in many different languages, cultures, and countries. It's a good, brief, and easily accessible tool that can help as a first step of differentiating some normal adjustment from a sign of postpartum depression pathology.
So if we think about how long have the symptoms been going on, how severe the symptoms are, how much they’re getting in the way of the other important goals for this woman—those are the kinds of things that help us differentiate one end of the continuum of typical expected challenges of the postpartum period from the not typical, not expected challenges of long-standing depressive symptoms that enter into each day and into lots of different domains of the woman's life.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Erin Henshaw discussing how we can differentiate postpartum depression from typical breastfeeding challenges. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Advances in Women’s Health on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
