In France, every year there are 100,000 women who live postpartum depression. It occurs within 3 months after childbirth and plunges mothers into great loneliness. According to a study conducted via the Flo health application (which allows you to observe your cycle and record your periods, mood changes, pain over the cycle, etc.) and published in the Journal of Psychiatry Research, the Covid-19 pandemic would have amplified the difficulty of the postpartum period for young mothers.
For 90 days after giving birth, women were asked to answer questions on the Flo app. The study was spread over several years: from January 2018 to March 2021 and took place in the United States. Nearly 280,000 data were able to be analyzed by the researchers.
Significant increase in postpartum depression in the United States
Between December 2020 and March 2021, young mothers were particularly affected by depressive symptoms, 7.7% of them testified to this during this period. Whereas usually (before the pandemic), the average for women with postpartum depression is 6.5%. With the epidemic, the researchers note that the average increased to 6.9%.
The idea for the researchers was also to understand whether the news had directly impacted this increase. Namely: to understand whether social isolation, ambient economic difficulties (unemployment) and the severity of the health crisis around them had played a role in the prevalence of depression. But they noticed that the places where women lived the least well their postpartum were not not especially places where female unemployment was high, nor states where the death rate from Covid-19 was the highest.
Source : Rates of self-reported postpartum depressive symptoms in the United States before and after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Journal of Psychiatric Research.
Read also:
- From 2022, postpartum depression will be screened
- After childbirth: everything that changes in our body (and that we are not told about)
