In a recent article, Margaret Spinelli, MD describes a proposal to the DSM-V committee of the American Psychiatric Association in 2020 arguing for the inclusion of postpartum psychosis as a unique diagnosis based on the cognitive disorganization that accompanies postpartum psychotic symptoms. The article clearly lays out the rationale for the inclusion of postpartum psychosis… Read More »
Essential Reads: Recognizing Postpartum Psychosis Because postpartum psychosis is a relatively rare event, we do not have as much information on this illness as we have on postpartum depression. In addition, most of the literature we have on postpartum psychosis is not new. A few years back, the American Journal of Psychiatry published an excellent… Read More »
In Brief: Postpartum Depression Common in COVID-Positive Women Separated from Their Newborns Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended temporarily separating newborns from mothers who tested positive for COVID-19 immediately after delivery. In a retrospective cohort study of 224 new mothers delivering at a New York hospital between March 18… Read More »
There is evidence in non-perinatal populations that human coronaviruses can be neurotropic and that virus infection may increase vulnerability to neuropsychiatric illness, including depression, anxiety, psychosis and delirium. Based on this finding, researchers have speculated that there may be an association between contracting COVID-19 and developing a postpartum psychiatric illness. This hypothesis has been preliminarily… Read More »