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Home › Articles › Mental and Emotional Health › The Baby Blues

The Baby Blues

Postpartum Depression in Canada

By Neilia Sherman

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After the birth of my first child eight years ago, I was seized by terrifying feelings of panic at the thought of being alone with him. When my husband dragged me out on a grocery expedition two weeks after he was born, I experienced heart palpitations and dizziness. It would be many months before I would be able to leave the house alone with him. I felt completely incapable of taking charge of this new life. Eventually, I found out that I was experiencing symptoms of postpartum depression.

Who Is at Risk?
Postpartum depression occurs in as many as one in five women, according to Ann Douglas, author of The Mother of All Baby Books and The Mother of All Pregnancy Books from Peterborough, Ontario. "It generally appears at some point during the first six to eight weeks after delivery, but it can show up at any time during the year after birth," she says.

A study published in the BioMed Central Family Practice Journal looked at a sample of 875 women who gave birth in five Ontario hospitals. Up to 15 percent of the otherwise healthy women who participated in this research had high scores on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression survey – an indicator that they were suffering from postpartum depression. The best predictors of a significantly high score on this survey were: lack of social support, lack of emotional support, a household income of less than $20,000, the desire to spend more time in hospital, self-identified care needs for a mental health problem and the mother's rating of her own and the baby's health as poor.

This study shows that there is a need to screen Canadian women for depression early in the postnatal period, as none of these women had been previously identified. In 1998, a hospital stay of less than 48 hours following an uncomplicated delivery had become normal practice in Ontario, which "reduced access to in-hospital identification and treatment of postpartum complications," according to the study. Now, Ontario policymakers have offered women the option of a 60-hour stay at the discretion of the mother.

Tanya Weiner of Nepean, Ontario did not believe that she had postpartum depression at first. "I had been home with my son for five and a half months, and I had been unhappy and crying for most of the time," she says. Finally, she went to see her doctor at the urging of her husband and mother and was diagnosed as having postpartum depression. He treated her with antidepressant medication and suggested that she take an additional two months of maternity leave.

Weiner says she felt tired all the time, no matter how much sleep she got. "Lots of crying, no patience, the feeling of being totally overwhelmed by everything. It got so bad that I had thoughts that scared me even though I knew that I would never act on them ... I wondered if I threw my son down the stairs if he would bounce. It was a very dark place to be," she says. Weiner feels that the extra help right after her son's birth for a longer period of time might have lessened the effects of her postpartum depression.

Symptoms of Postpartum Depression

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