I n January 2023, Sami Gentry felt completely alone. It was just weeks after the Dubuque resident had given birth to her first son, Crue. Following a rocky pregnancy, she struggled with breastfeeding and felt “defeated” when she wasn’t able to do so successfully.
“I knew the signs. I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I just didn’t have the initiative to do something until someone looked at me and said, ‘We’re scared for you, and you need to get help right now.
’” Gentry is among the many people who have dealt with postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety and related diagnoses during the period before and after giving birth to a child. Statistics on the prevalence of postpartum depression vary, due in part to the fact that many women who experience the symptoms never receive an official diagnosis, and many statistics rely on self-reports from mothers. However, according to the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a joint project by the U.
S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health departments, around 1 in 8 U.S.
women with a recent live birth reported experiencing symptoms of postpartum depression each year from 2016 to 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic might have caused that number to increase. University of Michigan School of Nursing and Michigan Medicine research on 670 postpartum patients who delivered babies from February to July 2020 found that one in three people experienced postpartum depression.
If untreated, postpartum d.