Baby blues or postpartum depression?
From the book – Chapter 30: Perinatal Mental Health
Baby blues and depression — keep the difference
Baby blues: tearfulness, wave of feeling, odd days in the first week or so, still able to be with the infant. Common. Usually passes.
Postpartum depression: the low mood stays, interest drops, sleep is broken even when the baby sleeps, guilt grows, the infant may feel far away. This is illness. It does not mean the mother has failed to love her baby.
If there are voices, a wish to harm the baby or the self, or a break with reality, that is an emergency — psychiatry the same day, not a relative saying it will pass.
Read the full chapter – Chapter 30: Perinatal Mental Health
Stories from real life
- The Tablet She Wanted to Throw Away – Anjali was twenty-nine and thirty weeks pregnant when she told her husband, Rohit, that she had put her antidepressant tablets in the bin. She had taken…
- Not Just Tired Tears – Zainab brought her daughter home from the hospital in Lahore on a Tuesday. By the fourth day she was crying over nothing: a cold cup of…
- The Birth That Went Well on Paper – Priya's daughter was born by emergency caesarean after a night of frightening alarms. The baby was healthy, the doctors smiled, and relatives sent cheerful photos. Everyone…
- A Quiet Room After the Scan – Sunita was ten weeks pregnant when a routine scan in Pune showed no heartbeat. The doctor spoke kindly, but the words blurred. By evening she was…
More on this topic: Children, teenagers and parents – mental health at home and school
More questions
- What we already know? (Chapter 30)
- Baby blues and depression — keep the difference – explained simply
- Understanding medicines – pregnancy and new parents
- Who else is in the room?
- What is true: postpartum depression is…?
- What is true: baby blues usually…?
- What is true: traumatic childbirth…?
- What is true: psychiatric medicine in pregnancy…?
- What is true: thoughts of harming the infant…?
- The Tablet She Wanted to Throw Away – what this story teaches, the signs and what to do