[NURSING 3X04] - Final Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam (43 pages long!)
29 Nov 2016
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Having a psychiatric illness during pregnancy affects the mother, her partner, her children and family, and as such represents a considerable public health problem. Service providers working with new mothers will likely provide care to women who have the illness. Clinicians and researchers use the term postpartum depression, or ppd, to refer to non-psychotic depression that occurs shortly after childbirth. A part from the fact that it happens soon after childbirth, ppd is clinically no different from a depressive episode that occurs at any other time in a woman"s life. The symptoms are the same as in general depression, and must meet the same criteria for diagnosis. However, the content of the symptoms of ppd often focuses on motherhood or infant care topics. Although health professionals do not know what causes depression (and therefore ppd), they accept that there is no single cause. Physical, hormonal, social, psychological and emotional factors may all play a part in triggering the illness.
