Post partum depression commonly occurs in women following a child birth. The common symptoms associated with post partum depression include recurrent sadness, loss of energy, sleeping disturbances, hopelessness, frustration, exhaustion, feeling lack of affection for the new born baby, guilt, low self esteem, social withdrawal, loss of appetite, and many other negative experiences. This article sheds light on different facts that you must know about post partum depression.
Risk Factors
Although researchers have not come into a single conclusion for what causes post partum depression, they put their emphasis on couple of factors. These are prenatal depression, lack of self esteem, prenatal anxiety, and continuous conflict with partner, low perceived social support, and family history of depression, low socioeconomic status and unplanned pregnancy. All of these factors are strongly correlated with the development of post partum depression in a woman. Additionally, mother’s race, social class or sexual orientation may also play a leading role.
Evolutionary Hypothesis for Post Partum Depression
 Evolutionary theorists suggest a potential cause for developing post partum depression in a living being. It explains that it is the natural tendency of the parents, either human or non-human, to invest in offspring only when the potential benefits outweigh the costs of taking care of the offspring. If the opposite condition occurs, the parental care will be simply reduced or eliminated. Lack of support from the father shifts the entire responsibility to the mother. In this situation, the mother have to pay the cost of raising the new infant either damaging or harming the existing children or damaging her own health.
In many cases, mothers experience lack of social support and may pass through different stressful events. This eventually causes the mother to shift their energy to meet the situational demands rather than investing it onto an unaffordable infant. The suffering mothers reveal higher degree of negative emotions and lesser degree of positive emotions headed for their children. Apparently their responses to child need are significantly inconsistent.
Prevention
If diagnosed at earlier stages and intervened accordingly, it may offer an effective outcome in most of the cases. Primarily, the prevention includes educating the women about the possible risk factors associated with post partum depression. There are various self-help groups that in combination with medical community may serve a beneficial support. The woman either pregnant or planning to become pregnant must be screened regularly by their health practitioners so that the early detection could be possible. In Canada, the screening test is conducted by professional public health nurses.
Treatment
Post partum depression is treatable. Medical evaluation is the primary step needs to be ruled out in order to diagnose the status of the problem in the concerned woman. After diagnosis, the suffering woman is suggested to undergo cognitive behavioral therapy, medication, and nutrition. Most of the cases, the health practitioners with the cooperation of the mother set up treatment plan. Although the symptoms are quite similar among the sufferers, the treatment policy is highly individualized. If the woman does not like her treatment plan, she may seek for the second opinion.
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