A Controlled Study of Post-Partum Mental Illness

Abstract

Although modern opinion recognizes that there is no such entity as puerperal insanity, views on the part played by the pregnancy in producing mental illness are not so unanimous. The fact that the onset of a patient's illness is related to the puerperium is considered by some authors to have a favourable, and others an unfavourable, prognostic significance. Puerperal mental illness achieves the distinction of separate identification in the International Nomenclature of Disease, not as “Schizophrenia in association with the Puerperium” or “Manic depressive psychosis in association with the Puerperium” but as Puerperal Psychosis, 688.1.