and their families, there are real-world implications of both treating and failing to treat this illness, and there is an urgent need to really help these women “climb out of the darkness” that is and defines postpartum depression.Less common but of great clinical importance is postpartum psychosis, which occurs in approximately 1 in 1,000-2,000 women based on estimates from several studies.
Another dilemma that patients and clinicians face after acute treatment is treatment duration, which is derived from how we conceptualize the illness. Even for experts in the area, there is not a consensus on whether postpartum psychosis should be considered asor whether it is a circumscribed diagnostic entity. This issue has been hotly debated for many years and is one of the reasons why the illness is not included in the DSM classification system.
A question patients and colleagues often ask is what is the long-term nature of postpartum psychosis. If one considers it clearly to be bipolar disorder, the most intuitive approach would be long-term treatment with mood stabilizers. We now have a growing amount of data on the longitudinal course of postpartum psychosis. In one, 64% of women who had an episode of postpartum psychosis developed episodes of recurrent psychiatric disorder mostly consistent with bipolar illness.