Psychoses Associated with Childbirth

Abstract

Pregnancy, with the associated pain and danger of labour and the Puerperium, is an ordeal for any woman, more so perhaps to-day than it has ever been, because of the wide publicity given to the toll of puerperal infection and the need for ante-natal care. An experience so intimately connected with the love-life, and with social and economic difficulties also, is often a period of acute mental stress in perfectly healthy women. Still more is it a time of psychological tension in those constitutionally unstable and liable to mental breakdown, both because they are not able to withstand the strain of mental conflict, and because they are the more likely to meet with such emotional problems on account of their temperamental unbalance.