Although postpartum depression is the most common side effect of pregnancy–roughly 1 in 6 women will experience a less often studied condition that may be equally common– post delivery post traumatic stress disorder.
Dr. Sharon Dekel, PhD is a leading researcher in the developing field of childbirth related PTSD. Her lab is focused on understanding, diagnosing and treating this regrettably common mental health challeng, and disentangling CB-PTSD from PPD. Diagnosis can be difficult to uncover because many women imagine themselves to be responsible for the natural challenges of labor and delivery; when the delivery doesn’t accord with their wishes, or takes a significant turn–which happens in roughly 20 to 30 percent of deliveries–women tend to blame themselves, and then fail to attend to the trauma and stress that follows them home from that experience. Dr. Dekel’s goal is to more quickly and accurately identify PTSD associated with childbirth, distinguish it from other postpartum mental health challenges, and get help for women who experience it. In our conversation today she talks about why this work is so important: not only does it address a significant source of stress on mothers, but PTSD can have dramatic impacts on the mother child bond, on the child’s development, and on the mother’s willingness to have more children.
Dr. Dekel also talks about her work training large language models to potentially identify PTSD after childbirth based on narrative based stories provided by women who’ve recently given birth.
To find Dr. Dekel’s work: https://www.massgeneral.org/doctors/22372/sharon-dekel-tsvetkov
You can also find Dr. Dekel’s Lab here: