ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the historical aspects of maternal mental illness, beginning with Hippocrates in the 4th century BC through to the 21st century. It shows how long we have known about this type of illness, how it was originally contextualised as part of hysteria, which men felt was due to a particular excess in emotions occurring only in women. It traces the paternalism running through maternal care, the medicalisation of emotions and the start of the use of tranquilizers in the 1960s and 1970s to supposedly ‘deal’ with the difficulties of motherhood. It touches briefly on insanity in childbirth and how women were incarcerated, then moves onto the change towards describing this illness as postnatal depression and the move towards mother blaming in the 1970s.
