ABSTRACT
Traditionally, pregnancy was considered to be a period of personal contentment for women; and this was also the accepted wisdom within the medical and psychiatric professions. Probably as a consequence of this, research into mood disorder in relation to reproductive events has been almost exclusively focused on the postpartum period. This is difficult to understand, since excellent studies published from the 1980s onwards uncovered significant affective morbidity during pregnancy. These reports, however, were ignored until more recent years. The findings from the main studies examining mood symptoms and/or mood disorder during pregnancy and the postpartum period are consistent and demonstrate high levels of depressive symptoms from the second trimester of pregnancy through to the postpartum period, falling following delivery. The point is best illustrated by comparing the findings from two of the most methodologically rigorous studies from different decades: those by O’Hara et al1 and Evans et al.2
