Therapy with other mothers helps with postpartum depression – 10/06/2023 – Balance

Mothers who have had postpartum depression may be the best therapists for new mothers who also face the disorder, according to researchers at McMaster University in Canada.

A clinical trial with almost 200 women, carried out over a year and a half during the Covid-19 pandemic, shows that mothers who received treatment from their peers (other mothers) were 11 times more likely to experience improvement in their depressive disorder. The results were published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica in September.

Postpartum depression affects one in five mothers of newborns worldwide, but only 10% receive evidence-based care. In Brazil, it affects one in four mothers, according to data from Fiocruz.

“There is a discussion about how we don’t have the human resources to treat all women and people with depression. So there have been many initiatives that help to provide greater scalability [atender mais gente, com menos recurso, sem prejuízo na qualidade] for treatment”, says psychiatrist Daniel Fatori, researcher at the child and adolescent psychiatry service at USP (University of São Paulo).

According to the doctor, it is an advantage for women to talk to someone who has experienced their situation — not only depression, but also motherhood. “We carried out a clinical trial during the pandemic on maternal depression in which we only called female psychologists who understood this context. We noticed that women feel more comfortable,” she says.

Fatori is one of the creators of the Motherly app, another way to expand care for mothers experiencing postpartum depression. The application, available for download in Apple stores, offers content that teaches women techniques used in psychotherapy. In a recent study, still in the final phase before publication, USP researchers noticed a greater response to daily tasks among mothers who used the tool.

Some of the symptoms of postpartum depression, says family psychologist Manuela Moura, can be intense sadness, crying, difficulty bonding with the newborn, guilt, insomnia, increase or loss of appetite. “Sometimes, it is accompanied not exactly by profound sadness, but by a very strong feeling of irritability, of being emotionally unavailable.”

In the research conducted in Canada, some mothers were drawn to receive nine weeks of group cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) delivered online by peers who had already experienced postpartum depression and have since recovered, and others to receive treatment usual.

The study finds that participants in the peer-led CBT group demonstrated clinically significant improvements in postpartum depression and anxiety, as well as better social support, less anxiety about the child and improvements in the baby’s temperament. These changes persisted up to five months after starting treatment.

“As someone who has recovered, if I had this support nine years ago, I may not have had postpartum depression with my second child. I would have had the resources and the opportunity to try to anticipate it if I could,” says Lee-Anne Mosselman -Clarke, who was one of the peer facilitators.

“I believe the program allows an openness to talk and listen to others’ experiences, which eliminates a lot of the shame and guilt around suffering with postpartum depression and anxiety,” she says.

Van Lieshout’s recent research has shown that group therapy for postpartum depression delivered by public health nurses with little or no prior psychiatric training has led to clinically significant improvements in depression.