Texas mother Andrea Yates shocked the world in 2005 when she was put on trial and eventually convicted for murdering her five children. The sad situation also brought to light the severities of postpartum depression if the disorder remains untreated; Yates was also suffering from postpartum psychosis. A new Danish study suggests that postpartum depression can also be linked with bipolar disorder later in life.
As The Los Angeles Times reports, the researchers searched a registry of more than 120,000 women who were receiving treatment for a first episode of a psychiatric illness besides bipolar disorder and found 3,062 of those women who were then later diagnosed with bipolar disorder:
“The analysis showed that the women who reported having symptoms of mental illness within two weeks of childbirth were more than three times as likely to be diagnosed later with bipolar disorder compared to women whose first episode of mental illness was not in the postpartum period. About 14 percent of the women with a first-time psychiatric problem that occurred just after childbirth went on to develop bipolar disorder within 15 years.”
According to the authors, these findings suggest that a postpartum-onset mental problem could actually be an underlying bipolar disorder.
“Despite improvements in reliability over recent decades,” write the authors, “the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, particularly of first episodes, is often unclear and needs to be revised as the illness develops.”
Source: Los Angeles Times
Heather Rudow is a staff writer for Counseling Today. Email her at hrudow@counseling.org.