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A call for a formal diagnosis for childbirth-related PTSD

Nature Mental Health volume 2, pages 259–260 (2024)Cite this article

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More than 140 million women give birth each year worldwide. Although this is commonly viewed as a uniformly happy event, a significant portion of women undergo complicated and highly stressful labor and delivery. A minority experience severe maternal morbidity (SMM), life-threatening complications that can result in death or a maternal ‘near miss’ — that is, nearly escaping death. These conditions carry serious short-term and long-term consequences for women, families and society. Their estimated prevalence worldwide is 2.45% and 1.68%, respectively1, with an increasing trend in SMM rates. This warrants improvement in maternal care.

Exposure to an event that entails actual threat to one’s own life or that of another can lead to the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)2. PTSD is included in the widely used US (DSM-5)2 and international (ICD-11) classifications of mental disorders. The PTSD diagnosis was introduced in the 1980s in response to the accusation that people affected by trauma (for example, US veterans returning from the Vietnam War) were presenting with hysterical-like symptoms of impairment. This formal diagnosis helped trauma-exposed individuals become more open to disclosing their mental health distress.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks S. Orr for his careful textual editing of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Sharon Dekel

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  1. Sharon Dekel
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Correspondence to Sharon Dekel.

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Competing interests

S.D. was supported by grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD108619, R21HD100817, and R21HD109546). The funding organization had no role in the conceptualization, decision to publish or the preparation of the manuscript.

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Nature Mental Health thanks Susan Ayers and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Dekel, S. A call for a formal diagnosis for childbirth-related PTSD. Nat. Mental Health 2, 259–260 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-024-00213-5

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