Curriculum · Mental Health / Psychiatry
Postpartum psychosis
What it is
Post-partum psychosis is a psychotic disorder of the weeks that follow delivery. It almost always occurs within 8 weeks of delivery.
How it presents
A woman of 28 who delivered her first baby 3 weeks ago and is brought to hospital by her family with a 2 weeks history of self-neglect, poor sleep and muttering to self carries the usual picture. Postpartum depression, postpartum blues, uncomplicated bereavement and generalized anxiety disorder are the diagnoses put beside it in the weeks after delivery, and they are not read as one: a 25-year-old woman who delivers a healthy baby boy by Caesarean section and over the next week becomes irritable and is not sleeping very well, worries that her child will die and fantasizes that if the child died she would kill herself, and who then begins to investigate how she might commit suicide, is given as postpartum depression and not as postpartum psychosis.