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Dr. Kim Mulvihill ReportingMany health care professionals have believed pregnancy protects a woman from depression, even if she has a history of the disease, but a new study disputes that belief.
Some believe there's a natural high with pregnancy. This new research says otherwise, that hormones or other factors in pregnancy aren't protective with respect to mood.
Lisa Kirshenbaum has suffered from depression for twenty years. Antidepressants really help her, but when she got pregnant five years ago, she stopped taking them on her psychiatrist's advice.
Lisa Kirshenbaum, Suffers from Depression: "He had given me information that, you know, I needed to go off all my medication and that pregnancy just created a natural high and that your body just adjusted and there was no risk really of depression."
But her depression came back, severely. Her pregnancy ended with a miscarriage and when she got pregnant again she decided to stay on her medication under the watchful eye of Dr. Lee Cohen.
Lee Cohen, M.D., Massachusetts General Hospital: "We looked at women during pregnancy with histories of depression who were on antidepressants and who chose either to continue or to discontinue those antidepressants during pregnancy."
Researchers tracked about 200 women through their pregnancies. Their findings appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Lee Cohen, M.D.: "We found that patients who stopped their antidepressant during pregnancy were five times more likely to have return of depressive symptoms than those patients who had decided to continue their antidepressant during pregnancy."
That's roughly the same rate of depression that women who are not pregnant suffer when they go off their antidepressants. In other words, pregnancy is not protective.
Lisa gave birth to a healthy girl, now two-years old, and has this advice for other women who suffer from depression.
Lisa Kirshenbaum: "I think they need to seek expert advice on what they should do on an individual basis. I don't advocate for medication, I advocate for expert advice before making decisions."
Women should talk to their doctors about the potential risks of using antidepressants during pregnancy, and they also need to talk about the risk of depression returning if they stop taking those medications during their pregnancy. Most antidepressants are considered safe for mother and baby during pregnancy.
And the risks don't stop with childbirth. Postpartum depression can be devastating. The postpartum period is a time of high vulnerablity for psychiatric symptoms. A woman's chance of being hospitalized for a psychiatric illness is greater during the first four weeks postpartum, than at any other time in her life.
Untreated depression in the postpartum period can affect the mother-baby relationship as well as the marriage. About 30% of women who have a history of depression will relapse around childbirth.
