Question:
What are the recommended treatments (traditional, alternative, or
nootropic) for post partum depression ?
Answer:
Are you sure she's going to have the depression? It's not inevitable after delivery, even if previously experienced with an earlier child. Even if experienced, it's often mild and brief. If all you're doing are making contingency plans, fine, but don't have her taking anything if she doesn't need it. Almost anything can pass through milk to the baby. Be very careful
there. Yeah, I know you're mentioning it as a concern, but some things
have never been tested by the FDA or other medical authorities,
particularly herbs and alternative meds. And even if something's told to
be 'used in blah blah for generations,' it may still not be safe. As the
red lead treatment of at least one ethnos for childhood diseases. Age
old remedy. The effects wouldn't have shown up clearly in a peasant
culture where child mortality was high anyway. In addition I recently read that it is believed that SIDS (sudden infant
death syndrome), in which infant months 2-4 are the highest risk, may be
caused by a deathly low level of DHEA. Although DHEA level of the infant
should be high at birth it generally declines during the danger period
which may be an opportune time for mild supplementation (perhaps 25mg).
Definitely consult your doctor first. Although post partum depression can be caused by a number of factors
(nutritional deficiencies among them) probably the greatest cause today
(especially in the US) is the outrageous proceedures commonly used
surrounding childbirth in hopsitals. The all too often routine
administration of anesthetic/epidurals etc. block out the normal
experience of childbirth. These proceedures are mainly "necessary"
because of our totally unjustified*1 practice of *routinely* having
births in hospitals or other institutions. Studies on various animals
have very consistently (and NOT surprisingly!) shown that when an animal
is forced to give birth in unfamiliar surroundings and, especially when
surrounded by individuals unfamiliar to it, many complications of
childbirth result.
Just another example of an all too familiar theme in medicine: New
proceedure is instituted (example: the original moving of childbirth
into hospitals), new proceedure causes problems (maternal and child
deaths GREATLY increased (by multiples) due to "childbed fever" - which
was caused by the doctors going directly from doing autopsies, etc. the
the delivery bed **without ever washing their hands**), medicine
refuses to consider the possibility that it's new proceedure is causing
problems and does many other additional new proceedures in an attempt to
solve the problem. (They never even considered stopping the practice
of hospital delivery even though it was well known and undisputed that
there was a much LOWER rate of childbed fever in home births.) They
NEVER changed the ultimate cause (routine hospital delivery) but solved
*ONE* of the resulting iatrogenic problems (childbed fever) by
introducing handwashing (*after* driving the individual who introduced
it to suicide for the heresy of suggesting that doctors might be harming
patients)*2 BUT other iatrogenic problems remained. So routine
anesthetics/epidurals were introduced to solve the prolems cause by,
among other things, requiring the mothers to *lie prone* (on of the
worst things one can do in uncomplicted deliveries) etc. etc.
