Mental health in the United Kingdom
Agnes Hann of the National Childbirth Trust said, "These findings are shocking, and mean that thousands of women experiencing potentially serious perinatal mental health problems are not getting the support they need. Perinatal mental illness can have a severe and long-term impact on mothers, babies and families. In extreme circumstances, it can result in tragedy – suicide is a leading cause of maternal death." From roughly 10% to 20% of women giving birth experience some type of mental illness such as anxiety and depression or more complex problems like PTSD and psychosis. With about 665,000 births a year in England 66,500–133,000 women a year develop illnesses. In 2016, 13,000 women were treated by perinatal teams while 800 became inpatients. This means the majority were untreated.
Childhood trauma
In 2006, a study was published explaining that The effect of maternal PTSD symptoms related to cortisol has been shown to be associated with infant cortisol levels as early as the first year of life, and may be associated with in utero effects of maternal stress Indeed. infants of mothers who developed PTSD in response to direct exposure to the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks showed decreased salivary cortisol levels early in life, compared to infants of WTC-exposed mothers who did not develop PTSD. This effect was most apparent in infants whose mothers were exposed during their third trimester of pregnancy. Their findings suggest that mothers with a greater susceptibility for developing PTSD may produce infants who are more easily distressed by novelty than are infants of mothers who are less prone to develop PTSD. Alternatively, mothers who more readily develop PTSD may perceive and then rate their infants as having generally negative temperaments. This was not the case, however, because these mothers only rated their infants as having greater distress to novelty but not as having other negative temperamental traits. The extent to which the behavioral changes in offspring persist is an important area for future inquiry (Brand, Engel, Canfield, and Yehuda, 2006).