Postpartum depression has become a significant topic of conversation recently, especially among women seeking to understand its implications during and after pregnancy.

During an interview with Daniel Oduro on the Lowdown program on GhanaWeb TV, a Clinical Psychologist, Jude Richwell Menokpor explained that many women experience stress after childbirth due to the challenges they face during pregnancy.

This stress can lead to mood changes.

He also mentioned that postpartum depression can occur when women neglect their self-care, including personal hygiene, and that of their babies.

“...so, with pregnant women who have gone through the rigorous journey of childbirth and bearing a child, they tend to have a form of stress and this stress, usually because they are not able to deal with these stresses, it causes them to have certain mood alterations and after the childbirth.”

“...And it is also characterised by them not taking care of themselves; so the low mood comes with low attention to their hygiene, low attention to the children themselves, the babies that they have given birth to and they keep having this thought of worry and feeling that there is no hope for the future. Maybe they’ve lost interest in things that they usually had interest in, which is called the Anhedonia, which characterises postpartum depression,” he emphasised.

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 10% of pregnant women and 13% of women who have recently given birth experience a mental disorder, primarily depression.

Adding to Jude’s submission, Priscilla Armah, also a clinical psychologist, stated that women go through postpartum depression due to some hormonal changes that occur after childbirth.

“There are hormonal changes in women. The hormonal changes women go through and the physical changes too, and even the thoughts of adding a new person to your life; you are coming to take care of some new being, the stress, the thoughts about it alone puts them into that situation.