These feelings may come and go in the first few days after childbirth. This seems strange and scary at the time. The baby blues often go away in a few hours or a week or so without treatment (American College, 2002).
Women with postpartum depression have such strong feelings of sadness, anxiety, or despair that they have trouble coping with their daily tasks. Without treatment, postpartum depression may become worse or last longer (American College 2002).
Twelve to sixteen percent of women experience postpartum depression (PPD), which results in feelings of despondency, inadequacy as a mother, impaired concentration or memory and loss of interest or pleasure in activities (Kleiman, 1994).
"Though debilitating, the emotional reactions to being a new mom that signify depression are not severe as those associated with postpartum psychosis, of which the predominant symptom is a "break" with reality-a loss of the ability to discern what is real from what is not" (pg.27). For instance, a woman with PPD may experience violent thoughts about the baby but recognizes that those thoughts are wrong and potentially dangerous. In that case, she will not act on them (Kleiman, 1994).
A woman with full - fledged psychosis, however, has temporarily lost the judgement needed to make this assessment. Very often, a woman with psychosis experiences a frightening sense of merging, she can't distinguish between where she ends and where her baby begins. Psychotic merger is so terrifying that she may try to avoid losing her sense of self by either committing suicide or infanticide (.
This was the case with Andrea Yates, whose suicide attempts ended with the deliberate drowning of her five children. Perhaps, in her mind, to prevent the "loss of self", she was compelled to kill her children or herself, or both (People).
Infanticide is a very rare phenomenon; only about four percent of women who become psychotic kill their babies.
