You Are Not Alone With Postpartum Depression

**Chuck** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

**Josh** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the Bummer edition, where we're hoping to shine a light on something to help people out.

**Chuck** (0:25)
That's right. You know how we do these playlists once a quarter now, which by the way, I hope people are enjoying those, sort of collecting things in groups and releasing them once a quarter in groups of 10 or 12
I thought it was kind of a fun idea, and we've been enjoying it, but maybe one day, something we can bucket is just really sad, joke-free episodes that we feel like are almost like a public service announcement.

**Josh** (0:51)
For sure.

**Chuck** (0:51)
We just call them bummer episodes you need to hear.

**Josh** (0:54)
Right. I think that's a great title. Let's do that. I mean, we have enough, for sure.

**Chuck** (0:59)
Yeah. I mean, this would definitely be one of them, because we're talking about postpartum depression and sort of the general bucket of post- and even prenatal and during natal troubles that women go through, because there are several subcategories that they kind of place under postpartum depression. But it is a real serious thing that affects, you know, I saw 10 to 15 percent.
I think Dave helped us with this and he said one in eight, which is about 12 percent of women experience this. And it's one of those things that is not talked about enough to where it seems like the numbers could be higher because people are still ashamed to admit this kind of thing happens.

**Josh** (1:48)
Yeah, there is a definite stigma on this to varying degrees, depending on your culture or ethnic group. Yeah. But basically, across the board, you're going to find a stigma against a new mother who can't get it together for her baby.
That's kind of like what people sometimes look at it as. And if you were basically being looked at like that, and you're already down on yourself because you're not performing perfectly to your own standards or whatever, that heaped on top of it, you're probably not going to be like, everybody, I need help. You're going to just dig in and just keep trying to go. And that is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do with any of what are called maternal mental health issues. There's a whole umbrella term. It's not just postpartum depression or perinatal depression. There's a bunch of other ones we'll talk about a little bit too.
But all of them add up to you got to ask for help. You also have to be on the lookout for needing to offer help to the new mother too if you're the father or a family member or a friend or something.

**Chuck** (2:58)
Yeah.
It's a brutal situation where giving birth is a, you know, it can be a very wonderful joyous thing, but no matter how you slice it, it's a very big sort of, and traumatic doesn't always necessarily I think mean something awful, but just such a big life event that then you're then expected, like, and now it's supposed to be the best thing ever, and you're going to be the happiest you've ever been immediately despite these huge hormonal swings, and you're going to be a perfect mom. You're going to be such a great mom. You're going to be a perfect mom. It's just so much pressure. And so yeah, this is a bit of a PSA for sure.

**Josh** (3:40)
And you hit something on the nose.
Being perfect immediately. I mean, being perfect is too high an expectation anyway. Nobody's perfect, but the idea that you're just supposed to immediately click with your kid and just now you're a perfect mom or a great mom, like that is not how it plays out very often. I would guess most of the time it doesn't play out.

**Chuck** (4:02)
It's a process.

**Josh** (4:03)
Exactly.
So like I said, postpartum depression or perinatal, I'm just going to call it postpartum. I basically don't know anybody who's ever called it perinatal depression.

**Chuck** (4:14)
Yeah.

**Josh** (4:14)
So we're just going to call it postpartum depression with the caveat that it doesn't just happen after birth, it can happen while during the pregnancy as well, right?

**Chuck** (4:24)
Yeah, and up to a year following birth as well.

**Josh** (4:27)
For sure. So again, this falls under the umbrella term of maternal mental health. There's also some others, postpartum anxiety, postpartum obsessive compulsive disorder. We'll talk about those a little bit later.