“If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail”
I thought of that old phrase while watching a segment of the PBS Newshour on the risk of postpartum depression among women. The featured guest on this segment was Dr. Hal Lawrence, CEO of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
…we know that 20 percent of all women will have some depression during their lifetime, and so some women actually enter pregnancy with some signs of depression.
Some may have already had a diagnosis of depression or psychological illness, and those people are at increased risk. So, picking that up early, or if you don’t know about it, helps you be careful about those parents when they become postpartum.
So, screening during pregnancy is very important. Screening postpartum is very important, and screening, you know, earlier than even six weeks.
The frequent depression among mothers (and I think that they’re talking here about U.S. mothers) is reduced to a mental health issue that should be dealt with by beefing up mental health services to individual patients based on widespread psychological screening.
There are lots of mentions of the stress of pregnancy and motherhood.
Here’s Dr. Lawrence:
Well, it’s such a stressful time. And everybody looks at pregnancy as this joyous moment.
And it is joyous, and you have a healthy mother, and you have a healthy baby. But there’s also a lot of stress. That woman’s life has changed. She feels — she’s so dedicated to her baby. And then anything that makes her feel uncomfortable, she questions herself: Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing it good enough?
The issue of “stress” is again reduced to a psychological problem of the patient.
But what isn’t mentioned at all are the social and political dimensions of pregnancy and childbirth.
After all, as one study after another have quickly found, the United States is one of the only countries without paid maternity leave and other support services for mothers and families.
Here’s one summary:
Recently released reports show that the U.S. and Papua New Guinea are the only two nations to not guarantee paid maternity leave for working mothers, while Hungary and Slovakia give 160 or more paid weeks of leave, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
There are lots of good articles to be found. Here are a few.
“The US is still the only developed country that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave,” The Guardian.
Paid Parental Leave: U.S. vs. The World (INFOGRAPHIC), HuffPost Parents
“Among 38 nations, U.S. is the outlier when it comes to paid parental leave,” Pew Research Center.
“Lots Of Other Countries Mandate Paid Leave. Why Not The U.S.?” NPR.org
Without the public services and support for mothers and families are routine in other developed countries, it’s no wonder that motherhood is an unusually stressful period in the United States.
It is a wonder, though, that the political aspects of motherhood were not even mentioned by the interviewer or his guest.
Ask a doctor, and he’ll tell you it’s a medical/psychiatric issue. Remember the hammer and all those nails….
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I feel the reason that the U.S. is not as generous with paid leave is that, from what I understand, the paid leave in other countries are either paid by the government or supplemented by the government. It is the small business that would have a very hard time giving an employee 4 months of paid leave, compared to a company with thousands of employees.
Maybe it has something to do with politicians who substitute money for mother’s milk.
As a mother of four, I would suggest that the sense of responsibility and sleep deprivation play a big role in a new mothers well-being. The U.S. is not a humane country. At least four months maternity leave is needed.
And a near majority of voting Americans don’t want any help given to people at all. The top one % has taken over so much control of politics and the collective American mind, it seems, that something like having and raising a child doesn’t matter at all. While these in control or would-be-controllers don’t want to help mothers and children, they are still adamantly against birth control or abortion. Is there any logic here at all?
Ian, you might want to write something about the Zika virus (under the rubric of health or economics, or both).
Here is a map of the habitat of the mosquito species Aedes aegypti (the ‘yellow fever mosquito’) and Aedes albopictus both of which carry dengue fever; the former species is definitely a vector for Zika virus, and the latter is perhaps, as well.
http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/crop_0_15_600_337scalefit_630_noupscale/5667af211600002900e55647.jpeg
Here is a map of areas of the US that are impacted by dengue fever. Only Hawaii and southern Texas seem affected.
http://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/Files/Maps/Global_DengueTransmission_ITHRiskMap.png?ua=1
A simple extrapolation might suggest that Texas and Hawaii are likewise especially vulnerable to the Zika virus.
It’s not the actual impact of an epidemic on public health in Hawaii that might be a danger, but the mere presence of Zika that might be of concern for the economy. One issue is tourism. Another is high-end real estate (72% of new homes on Maui and 42% of new homes on Oahu are purchased by affluent foreigners, like Canadians and Japanese nationals). Risk-averse Japanese tourists and home-buyers might go instead to Vancouver, BC or New Zealand.
Not talking about this is not a real solution.