There are two new pieces of research on postpartum depression in this month's issue of the journalPsychiatric Services.
The first took a look at whether culturally relevant, enhanced brief interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT-B)offers better advantages to low-income depressed pregnant women than the normal care used to treat this population. The "IPT-B"consisted of a beginning"engagement" session, followed by 8 sessions before the birth and maintenance IPT up to6 months postpartum. The sessions were specifically enhanced to make them culturally relevant to socioeconomically disadvantaged women. Unfortunately the abstract does not indicate what those enhancements were, but if you have an online subscription you can download the full text. Anyway, the results of thestudy showed the womenhad significant reduction in depression symptoms prior to childbirth andpostpartum.
For the second study, researchers at Yale Universitytook a look at the Healthy Start depression initiative to see whether it results in reduced rates of depressive symptoms and increased rates of detection, referral and treatment among pregnant and postpartum women. The results found that the Healthy Start depression initiative did not change the levels of depressive symptoms or increase use of depression treatment.
According to the Materna & Child Health Bureau, the perinatal depression initiative was launched to increase the number of women who sought treatment, increase the number of providers who recognized the signs and symptoms and provide screenings. The Yale researchers, according to the abstract, found that "universal screening and support for treatment referral by paraprofessionals did not reduce the overall rates of depressive symptoms of perinatal women who received care at publicly funded obstetrical clinics." They suggest that future screenings should engage women more severely affected by these disorders. From what I can tell, but I can't be sure, they didn't use the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Screening Scale to identify the women, so I'm wondering if the screening tool was part of the problem. Just curious. I'd like to know more about this.
Someone out there who loves me and who has a subscription to Psychiatric Services could be a real hero and send me the full texts. 😉
