Treating the Cause of Maternal Mental Illness

Abstract

This chapter highlights how important it is to focus on the root cause, or source of maternal mental illness, rather than offering only symptomatic relief. It highlights that symptomatic relief may be short-term relief only and may entail the woman needing to keep returning for treatment. If we address the cause of maternal mental illness, then we offer the woman the possibility to conceive a future with no mental illness. The chapter looks at some of the research into prior mental illness and its influence on illness in motherhood. It advocates enquiring about historical factors that could be the root cause. The chapter ends with a clinical vignette about a woman who had catastrophic thoughts about death and extreme levels of anxiety in pregnancy and her subsequent discovery, in psychotherapy, that this was not about the pregnancy at all, it was about her traumatic experiences in childhood.