Postnatal depression

BMJ 1998;317:1658 ( 12 December )

Letters

Postnatal depression

Postnatal depression is not being missed in primary care

Biology mustn't be excluded

Postnatal depression is not being missed in primary care

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ In their review of postnatal depression Cooper and Murray comment that depression is often missed by primary care teams.¹There are several reasons why this might be the case, even thougha reliable tool (the Edinburgh postnatal depression scale) hasbeen available for detecting its presence for over 10 years.²

When the Edinburgh postnatal depression scale has been used to detect postnatal depression, health visitors have used variousstrategies to help women, with varying degrees of success. ² ³ Factors that influence the process of screening and caring forwomen with postnatal depression include health visitors' workloadand their willingness to use the Edinburgh postnatal depressionscale³ and the readiness of women to be labelled as patientswith depression, to accept an intervention by a health visitor,^2-4or to be referred for further care. ² ³ There is still uncertaintyabout when to use the Edinburgh postnatal depression scale, whereto set the . . . [Full text of this article]