Support groups and group therapy options focused on psychoeducation around postpartum depression have been shown to enhance the understanding of postpartum symptoms and often assist in finding further treatment options. Other forms of therapy, such as group therapy, home visits, counseling, and ensuring greater sleep for the mother may also have a benefit. While specialists trained in providing counseling interventions often serve this population in need, results from a recent systematic review and meta-analysis found that nonspecialist providers, including lay counselors, nurses, midwives, and teachers without formal training in counseling interventions, often provide effective services related to perinatal depression and anxiety.Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (iCBT) has shown promising results with lower negative parenting behavior scores and lower rates of anxiety, stress, and depression. iCBT may be beneficial for mothers who have limitations in accessing in person CBT. However, the long term benefits have not been determined. Medication
A 2010 review found few studies of medications for treating PPD noting small sample sizes and generally weak evidence. Some evidence suggests that mothers with PPD will respond similarly to people with major depressive disorder. There is low-certainty evidence which suggests that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are effective treatment for PPD. The first-line anti-depressant medication of choice is sertraline, an SSRI, as very little of it passes into the breast milk and, as a result, to the child. However, a recent study has found that adding sertraline to psychotherapy does not appear to confer any additional benefit.
Based on current meta-analytic research, it has been concluded that the prevalence of postpartum posttraumatic stress disorder was 3.1% in community settings and 15.7% in at-risk populations; however, those findings do state various limitations, including underreporting biases, across the examined studies which lead many researchers to believe the prevalence may be higher.As of right now, there are no widely recognized assessments that measure for postpartum posttraumatic stress disorder in clinical and medical settings. However, researchers and physicians will often use more reliable posttraumatic stress disorder questionnaires and assessments, which are unfortunately not always specific enough to the posttraumatic symptoms and experiences that are felt before, during, or after childbirth. One assessment for postpartum posttraumatic stress disorder, the City Birth Trauma Scale (CBTS), has been used in some research settings; however, it is not widely used in clinical and medical settings. The CBTS is a 29-item self-report questionnaire developed to measure birth-related posttraumatic stress disorder, according to the DSM-5 criteria of: symptoms of re-experiencing the event, avoidance, negative cognitions and mood, and hyperarousal, as well as the duration of ones symptoms and the amount of distress and impairment the symptoms have caused in the individuals life. The creators of the CTSB also added in two items from the DSM-IV that they felt were relevant to the population being assessed with this measure – that the mothers responded to the traumatic events during childbirth with intense fear, helplessness, or horror and that there were symptoms of emotional numbing.