The Baby
BLUES
©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/ELENA STANOJKOVIC
How to get help when you’re suffering with postpartum depression
eing a new mom is challenging enough—balancing feeding, cleaning and caring for your baby on little to no sleep. Now add in hormonal ups and downs, emotional overload, birth plan disappointments, identity issues, irritability and anxiety over everything from whether the baby is breathing properly to how you’ll be able to afford to send her to college. Combine all that with feelings of isolation, already common in our increasingly digital world and made worse by COVID. When
JUNE 2021 | NEW JERSEY FAMILY
By Jennifer Kantor
you add it all up, it’s not surprising that up to 85 percent of women experience one to three weeks of the baby blues. And it isn’t just the blues—the mildest form of what’s collectively known as perinatal mood disorders (PMD). “Ten to twenty percent of women develop a mood disorder at some point from the time they become pregnant to up to a year after giving birth,” says Jill Wodnick, project coordinator for Pre/Perinatal Programming and Community Outreach,
51
