ABSTRACT
PND, whatever its cause or consequences, occurs within the context of a woman’s life: that life does not stop because she has had a baby. Nor is that life directly comparable to that of the woman in the next delivery suite, or the woman at the other end of the country who has had a baby at the same time. Nor are the lives of any of the women in my study directly comparable. More important, nor are the lives of women in the studies which have been designed to control for confounding variables such as parity, age, marital status, type of delivery, sex of child or social class by any means identical. Each baby is born into a dynamic social scenario which is both constantly changing and linked through the biographies of the mother and other family members. It is this sense of individuality played out in a gendered, patriarchal context that needs to be understood before any effective understanding of PND can be developed.
