Hello and welcome to Five Things. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, September 21st, 2023, and this is a special episode of Five Things.

The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first pill to treat postpartum depression, a condition that affects around one in seven women in the United States.

Health experts say Zeronalone could be a game changer. The disorder threatens not only the well-being of the mother, but the entire family, and can become life threatening.

So what are some of the best strategies for recognizing, understanding, and dealing with postpartum depression?

We're joined now by Julie Lampa, a certified nurse midwife at Mayo Clinic and Mother of Two. Thank you for joining us, Julie.

Hi, Dana. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Postpartum depression has at times been dismissed as baby blues or simply attributed to the hormonal changes that come with childbirth.

So what is postpartum depression, and how does it differ from normal emotional adjustments after childbirth?

Yeah, that's a great question. So it is very true that postpartum baby blues are kind of labeled to include the up and down emotions, mild symptoms of depression,

within the first couple of weeks after having a baby, usually within the first two to three weeks, and that actually is experienced by about 80% of women. So it is a really high volume.

And then how we kind of distinguish the difference between the baby blues and postpartum depression is depression that is occurring within the first one year after having a baby.

So the first four months is the highest risk time, but people need to be aware that anything within the first one year of having a baby would be labeled back to that postpartum timeframe.

So that can be really surprising for a lot of women and that they don't relate, you know, the two things together.

There's a lot of other postpartum mood disorders that are more so even related to anxiety to OCD behaviors to PTSD.

Pregnancy is a situation that's ripe for anxious thoughts. Postpartum depression was described by one mom is something that can make all of your choices feel high stakes.

Who's an ideal patient for medication?

The highest risk patients for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders or postpartum depression are those who have history of depression.

Other ones would be, you know, you're in a situation where you're pregnant or postpartum and you don't have a lot of support from your partner or from family or from friends, kind of social isolation.

The extreme ages of childbearing can be a risk factor. So, you know, greater than 40, but also, you know, teens and early 20s.

We might want to consider counseling during the pregnancy. We want to maximize mental health as much as possible during the pregnancy to set us up for a really good postpartum experience.

So, what are some of the potential underlying causes or triggers of postpartum depression? Something that's easily dismissed like sleep deprivation, just a change to your daily schedule. How did those play a role?

There's the feeling of aloneness. I mean, we're still needing to really talk about postpartum depression a lot in order to get it kind of more mainstream and so people don't keep it to themselves.

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