Postpartum Depression

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While delivery of a baby can be a blessing to many, many mothers, around 80%, experience some depressive symptoms. For many of these women, the symptoms disappear within a few hours or days. For other mothers however (around 10-20%) these symptoms last and become what is known as postpartum depression. This depression is often characterized by wild hormonal changes after delivery and can have the mother feeling as if they might harm their baby. When new mothers experience this postpartum depression, they may also experience exhaustion while feeling emotionally drained. When these factors combine for long periods of time and become postpartum depression, the baby may suffer. While the child’s intellectual ability typically remains unchanged, …show more content…
Postpartum depression alone can be a tough battle, but many women may also face additional stressors that they are unequipped to face. Workplace stressors, family stress, and other stressors may place undue burden on women who are in the throes of postpartum depression. As a result of postpartum depression, mothers may lack the energy needed to coddle their baby and attend to its needs. When a baby repeatedly tries to engage their baby without a successful response from the mother, the baby will eventually cease trying to relate to the mother. In fact, babies whose mothers suffer from postpartum depression look less at their mothers and show fewer signs of positive emotions compared to babies of healthy moms. To help new moms struggling with postpartum depression, research has shown that the tried and true method of cognitive behavioral therapy works quite …show more content…
To do this, organizations could extend maternity leave so that the mother is not worried about having to come back to work before she is ready, mentally and physically, to come back to work. This would potentially decrease or remove this stressor from the mother and allow her to focus on strengthening her bond with the baby. Even though paternity leave is required under the family medical leave act, in many organizations, men are subtly castigated for using such services as this places an increased workload on other organizational members. Because of this, the organization could introduce paternity and maternity leave that is a part of the core competencies of the organization so that male members of the staff are not looked down on for utilizing the service. Having the father around more would help ease the burden faced by new mothers and would allow the fathers to share in the workload. A final measure that the organization could put in place would be to pay for, or help pay for, child day care services for a predetermined amount of time. Some companies, like Alphabet (formally Google), have added company day cares so that new families need not worry about the costs of infant day care and can focus on the health of their new family. Even though no protective measure is guaranteed to work, these recommendations
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