Psychoanalyst William Meyer shares with us a therapeutic approach to postpartum depression.

Welcome to the Carlyte Psychiatry Podcast, keeping psychiatry honest since 2003.

I'm Chrisaken, the editor-in-chief of the Carlat Psychiatry Report.

And I'm Kelly Newsom, a psychiatric MP and a dedicated reader of every issue.

I ended last week's podcast with some hope that Zeranelone may spare some women with undiagnosed bipolar disorder

from taking antidepressants in the postpartum phase.

And, in fairness, psychotherapy,

light therapy, TMS and ECT also protect women from that problem, a common problem that affects

somewhere between 15 to 50% of women with postpartum depression who actually have unrecognized bipolar disorder.

Today we're going to look at the therapeutic approach, one honed by the late William Meyer,

a psychoanalyst at Duke who spent most of his career helping women with postpartum depression

through individual and group therapy. We caught up with Dr. Meyer at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,

shortly before he passed in 2021.

He had built a small hexagonal-shaped therapy office in the front of his yard

with stained glass windows, and we interviewed him in that holding environment.

Bill, what do you see is the cause of postpartum depression?

A lot of times we'll see in study in reports or studies will say, we don't know what causes postpartum depression.

This isn't true. We can always learn new things, of course.

But this is an area that's been studied up one side and down the other, and we know a number of things.

We know that women who are depressed

during pregnancy are a special risk. We know that women who do not feel supported by their

partners are at special risk. We know that women who have had unhappy childhoods are at special

...