Postnatal Depression
Quentin Spender, Niki Salt, Judith Dawkins, Tony Kendrick, Peter Hill, David Hall, Jackie Carnell in Child Mental Health in Primary Care, 2018
Early detection is important. However, this cannot be achieved until the end of the first week or two, by which time the baby blues will have passed. Screening using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale4 (seeBox 16.1) has been shown to be an easy and reliable way of detecting postpartum depression. It involves a 10-item self-report questionnaire and has a high specificity and sensitivity. It has been both used and validated in clinical practice in primary care, and several studies have shown how easy it is for health visitors and general practitioners to use. Each question is scored from 0 to 3 according to increasing severity of the symptom concerned. Questions 1, 2 and 4 are scored 0–1–2–3, while questions 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are reverse scored 3–2–1–0. A score of 12 or higher indicates a need for further assessment. For ease of reference the Scale is repeated on one page at the end of this chapter.
The internal frame at the Child Health Centre
Björn Salomonsson in Psychodynamic Interventions in Pregnancy and Infancy, 2018
One way of helping a mother to handle the tension between early and late editions, or between primitive affects and the defences against them, is to help her “thicken” the late edition; solidify repressions, encourage and convince her that she is a great mother. Such supportive practice is common among nurses, for example, in consultations using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS; Cox, Holden, & Sagovsky, 1987) and in developmental guidance (Lojkasek, Cohen, & Muir, 1994) at child health units. It can also be endorsed from a psychoanalytic point of view. Every mother wants to hear that her baby is wonderful. She is in a brittle state and her self-image swings up and down. A friendly comment is thus “good medicine”, especially for mothers who panic and do not wish to understand their unconscious motivations or earlier palimpsest editions. Perhaps Nora, in Chapter 5, would have benefited from such messages from her analyst. As she listened to Nora’s grievances and her story about her childhood pacifier, she got an interior image of a screaming child in front of her. This was when she felt it was like having two babies in the consulting room. This made her adopt a more supportive and encouraging technique. Had she done this a bit earlier, it is not unthinkable that Nora would have nursed less grievance against her.
Measurements of Depression and Anxiety Disorders
Siegfried Kasper, Johan A. den Boer, J. M. Ad Sitsen in Handbook of Depression and Anxiety, 2003
The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale [79] was designed to identify patients with postpartum depression. This instrument is a 10-item self-report questionnaire providing a probable diagnosis of depression on the basis of Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC). It takes approximately 10 min to complete this instrument. This scale seems to be well accepted and it appears to be helpful for aiding general practitioners in detecting major and minor depressive disorder occurring in the postpartum period. It also has the advantage that many usual somatic features in postpartum women, including changes in sleep and energy, are not scored as pathological. In addition to performing as a screening tool, the EPDS measures the severity of depression.
Psychological Distress Prospectively Predicts Later Sleep Quality in a Sample of Black American Postpartum Mothers
Published in Behavioral Sleep Medicine, 2022
Madeleine F. Cohen, Elizabeth J. Corwin, Anne L. Dunlop, Patricia A. Brennan
Postnatal depressive symptoms were assessed using summary scores from the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) (Cox et al., 1987). Mothers were asked to decide whether statements referencing low mood and anhedonia described them in the past week. One item on the EPDS directly references sleep and fatigue (“I have been so unhappy that I have had difficulty sleeping.”) and was thus removed from all subsequent analyses, resulting in a total of nine EPDS items. Scores on the EPDS range from zero to 30; scores greater than or equal to ten suggest clinically significant depressive symptoms in Black American perinatal women (Tandon et al., 2012). In the current study sample, internal consistency for the 9-item scale was good: Cronbach’s α = 0.86 (3-months postpartum), 0.87 (6-months postpartum).
Postpartum Depression Risk in Husbands of Women Who Had Caesarean Section Deliveries in Turkey
Published in Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 2018
Gulten Isik Koc, PhD, Sule Ergol, PhD
This study was conducted as a descriptive study. Husbands of 313 women who gave birth for the first time and via caesarean section in Zonguldak Maternity and Child Health Hospital in Turkey between February and March of 2014 were included in the study. The data were collected in two stages through a sociodemographic data collection form prepared by the researchers and the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). In the first stage, the fathers were informed about the aim of the study and their written consents were received at the seventh day after birth when they came with their wives to the hospital for the first visit and the sociodemographic data collection form was applied by the researchers. In the second stage, the researchers visited the fathers at home or at work in the eighth postpartum week and fathers filled out the EPDS by themselves. The reason for interviewing with the fathers at the eighth postpartum week is that duration of the postpartum period after caesarean section is defined as 8 weeks (Akan & Taskin, 2016). The risk of depression in mothers was an independent variable in the study, so the EPDS was applied to participants’ wives in the second stage. Fifteen fathers who could not be reached for the second stage of data collection were excluded from the study, and the study was completed with 298 fathers.
Prevalence and related factors of postpartum depression among reproductive aged women in Ahvaz, Iran
Published in Health Care for Women International, 2020
Poorandokht Afshari, Mitra Tadayon, Parvin Abedi, Shiva Yazdizadeh
Edinburgh postnatal depression scale is including 10 questions and each question scores with four items Likert scale from zero to three. The total scores >12 was considered for possibility of depression (Eberhard-Gran, Eskild, Tambs, Opjordsmoen, & Samuelsen, 2001). This questionnaire was translated to Persian and validated by Mazhari and Nakhaee (2007) in Iran. In the Mazhari et al’s study, the EPDS was translated to Persian and back-translated to English. Then the EPDS and the 12-item General Health Questionnaire were completed by 600 women in the postpartum period. There was a good correlation between EPDS and 12-item GHQ (r = 0.76). Cut-off point for postpartum depression in the EPDS was considered 12 and the researchers found that the Persian version of EPDS is a valid tool for screening postpartum depression.