Discuss about the Postpartum Depression Screening Scale.
During the first few days of pregnancy and after childbirth, a woman experiences a whirlpool of emotions. These emotional experiences can be of a wide variety and the new mother may feel in several different ways including happiness, bliss and joy, which are most understandable for a mother. However, she also becomes prone to emotions that are not so gleeful. Sadness and helplessness are the two most widely experienced emotions that a new mother comes across, which is often referred to as “baby blues” (O’hara and McCabe 2013). While most of the women who experience these emotional turmoil post childbirth, overcome the problems within one or two weeks, there are some who experience something more severe and extreme management (Bina and Harrington 2016). The grim and gloomy feelings can be attributed to sudden hormonal changes while pregnancy and shortly after childbirth. While this is a serious issue for even the people who are living in the “advanced” countries, who have all the privileges and advantages of the world, one should try and imagine the ordeal that migrant women face. Anxiety can become much more intense when a mother is already facing problems of persecution and has to leave her own country to seek refuge in another. The current report would take a look into the problems that entail of becoming a mother who has to flee the securities and assurances of her own home and try to understand the severity and the magnitude of the problem (Mehta et al. 2014).
Right after childbirth the hormone levels in a woman’s body drop, leading to chemical changes in her brain which cause mood swings. Sleep deprivation that arises from the need to take care of the newborn child can lead to further deterioration in the health condition of the women. Postpartum depression is not a weakness of character, it is a medical and mental complication that arises from childbirth. When this postpartum psychosis develops among women, it is of dire need to efficiently tackle the issues because otherwise it would lead to long lasting depression that may have a permanent impact on the psyche on the mothers (Putnam et al. 2017). If not treated, postpartum depression (PPD) can become a big obstacle while carrying out daily routines and chores. That is what that makes the current research so important: without treating PPD, women who are suffering from this cannot be ensured a life that is safe and secured. It is the responsibility of the society to extend its help to the women and give them a healthy and good life (De Choudhury et al. 2014).
Migration is one of the most important issues in the modern day world. When countries and regions are riddled with war and civil problems, many people are facing persecution in their own countries and are being forced to leave their homelands. The political, social and mental pressure that these people experience are traumatizing, forever changing their lives. (Falah-Hassani et al. 2015) When women who have already been forced to migrate are giving birth in a different country, the complexities intensify and the impact is compounded exponentially. There are not many research or literature that talks about the trauma and the hardships faced by migrating mothers and how the political and personal spheres merge to pose as a monolithic obstacle in their lives. What little research and literature are available mostly talk about quantitative aspects of a research and try to give statistical data that try to answer questions that yield numerical results, pertaining to the knowledge of “how many?” or try to give trends about what percentage or fraction of the migrating women face post childbirth mental problems. The current research would try to look into the humane aspects of dealing with a problem that tries to provide mental support to those who are already undergoing physical hardship (Alhasanat, Fry?McComish and Yarandi 2017).
Although there has been some work on PPD, the effects of it on immigrant women has not been given the importance it needs. That is probably because it is not seen as a feasible problem yet. Despite being ignored or overlooked, it is a real issue and needs to be addressed promptly (Katz and Gagnon 2016). This current paper aims to shed light on this matter and try to make people aware about the problems PPD creates for the women who have to migrate.
There is a significant gap in the available literature that shows the complexity of the psychological problems that the women have regarding PPD and the effects it has when coupled with the problem of immigration. The cultural, social and spiritual aspects are not taken into account as much as they should be (O’Mahony et al. 2013). This paper would try to bridge that gap and give possible solutions that may help to give the women suffering from PPD more support as well as trying to sympathize with their problems rather than shunning them away to take yup the burden on their own.
There are still not enough literature or theories that can be a formidable base for the trauma that the women face in this issue. Even less amount of research has happened when it comes to the ordeal of the immigrant women. There are some basic frameworks that provide the basis of the research at hand (Depression 2015). To understand and appropriately fathom their misery, we must first get a fair idea about what postpartum depression is and how does it affect the mothers. There are some symptoms which can help to understand whether someone has been suffering from PPD. These include
PPD can develop during pregnancy and in some cases does not even fester until after a few months post childbirth. In extreme cases this can lead to cases of hallucination, paranoia and thoughts of harming one’s self or her baby can become overpowering (Mertens 2014).
Postpartum depression can be triggered by a lot of factors. Women who already have past cases of mental health issues or depression face even greater risks of falling into the grasp of this issue. Hormonal changes in the body that occur during times of pregnancy and after childbirth is one of the biggest factors of PPD to set in (Wittkowski, Patel and Fox 2017). If there are any additional problems that has the individual thinking about it during the childbirth., then chances are the effects of PPD will be amplified. PPD can be triggered if the social construct is not very strong and cannot provide the mother with the support and the care that she requires during the pregnancy period and just after childbirth. In cases where the women are made to leave from their own country and go seek refuge somewhere else this social pressure is immense and often not well handled by most. PPD is often been observed to be more powerful when the child has special needs and/or are specially abled (Wisner et al., 2013). This compounds the burdens of childcare and often leads to severe cases of depression.
It is very difficult for a woman to handle this own her own, even more so if the woman is a single parent. Only a health care provider can give her special care and bring her out of the mental state where she faces only torment with herself, coupled with feelings of guilt, embarrassment and other self-derogatory thoughts. Symptoms and infestation of this syndrome is different in every person and this problem has to be dealt with in very unique ways (Higginbottom et al. 2016). It must be remembered that a health care professional has the training to properly talk to these women regarding their problems and plan a recovery process accordingly.
If everyday women face these problems after childbirth and during pregnancy, then it is only natural to understand why would this effect be even stronger and more serious for those who are immigrants. The security of one’s own home and country are very assuring and the loss of this sense of security when she is vulnerable physically and mentally, would lead to a heightened effect t on the mothers. The amount of research on the effects of PPD on immigrant women is still inadequate even though the overall concern about this form of depression has gained more attention and more and more people are opening about the evils that entail this problem and trying to provide support and care to those who need it. This paper is taking the aspect of the trauma that are faced by the immigrant women and the compounded effects of PPD on them.
Immigrants, both males and females, face unique set of challenges, wherever they live. These sets of challenges often create such a condition for them that may compromise their mental health and they are often seen not be given adequate care, both physically and mentally. For the women, this is even more intense because women are still looked at as being dependent on the males and a liberal view is still not established in many places of the world. Moreover, if the women are in their postpartum period in these times, it only increases the chances of PPD. While some of the countries help the women to overcome their problems as being a part of the society, there are wide cultural differences across the planet and some cultures only instigate the mental condition of the women so much that they are more engulfed in the mental depression.
While the bulk of the work on PPD has not been done while keeping the immigrant women in the focus, the few that do, are more bent towards trying to find the percentages and numbers, that show how many women are suffering from this and how big is that number among the total population. These fractions and numbers often fail to address the humane side of the problem and hence lacks the intimacy it should have provided to the women suffering from this, rather than just indicating how many of them are suffering and not do anything about that. This paper would try to input that aspect into the researches and devise methods that would enable to best understand the mentality and the views of the immigrant women suffering from PPD.
The current paper hopes to come up with strategies and methods that would help to understand the ordeal of the immigrant women suffering from PPD in a better way all the while taking a more personal and intimate approach while interacting with these women (Ritchie et al. 203). This would give more insights and a better understanding about the problems and the aspects where the women feel most depressed about or the point which make them hold the most amount of grievance (Ormston et al. 2014). These personal account and their own reflections about their own problems will give much more reliable data that would enable to provide better and more inclusive care to these women.
There can be many different strategies that may be adopted which shall facilitate in this research management. Since this research is more inclined towards doing a qualitative research, the methods that are going to be prescribed here will be more biased towards trying to take a look at the problem of PPD on immigrant women in a more theoretical terms, which would be more reliant on literature and not just numerical analysis. Few of the methods that are going to be adopted are, photo voice method, diary writing and drawing method.
These methods have been because of the simple reason that the people who are to be interviewed or questioned are highly vulnerable in terms of mental stability. No conventional qualitative analysis method can be of help here, and the chosen methods have been seen to be more intimate and compassionate in previous researches in other fields. Some of these methods may even be alienating for some of the people and be counter-productive for the purpose of the research as a whole. On the contrary, the methods that have been chosen for the current research are more empathizing in terms of compassion and have been used before for researches relating to feminism studies and have proved themselves more useful than the conventional methods.
Drawing method: Some researchers have adopted this style to gather information from people who feel they are mentally vulnerable and yet require themselves to be more expressive while talking about their problems. The drawing method gives the people who are being interviewed an advantage in terms of expressing themselves more. The subjects are to be given drawing tools and would be asked to draw whatever they feel like or how they think they can best visually express their own perception about their problems. In many cases, drawing method is paired with writing methods that further enables the subjects to express their feelings and help the research by clearly defining what they are thinking or what do their paintings mean. This particular method has been more used in the research with children because they often lack the words or the vocabulary that help in the research, or cannot properly fathom their own problems, simply because they cannot yet comprehend the magnitude of the issue. This aspect gives this method an advantage by making sure that this is a depiction of pure emotions of the women and not polluted by social dogma.
Photo elicitation: This is a method that uses visual images to help the test subjects to elicit expressions and comments. This would be helping the women to express themselves through a medium, making it easier for them to tell exactly how they feel. This method gives space and is open to interpretation. This particular point would facilitate in the understanding of the unique problems of the immigrant women suffering from PPD (Taylor Bogdan and DeVault 2015). This method would give important insights about the problems they face and how they perceive their problems.
Diary method: Asking the women who are going through PPD is to write their own minds is a good way to communicate. Many women are not comfortable conversing with people in interviews and feel more at ease if they are asked to write on paper. Making them keep a diary log would be beneficial in the aspect that it would give data for over a period of time. While most other methods are done within a short span of time and maybe are even competed in one day. This method, on the other hand, would be requiring the women to keep a log book and this would help the research to gather information about how they are feeling in a day-to-day basis. Valuable information regarding the mood swings can be obtained. Moreover, it can also be observed what are the triggers for the depression to set in and what circumstances can lead to PPD to become more intense. Surroundings and circumstantiality can be noticed and the research may give important results that would help any further research to look into the conditions in which these women are staying, to try and alter those conditions so that they can be helped to come out of it.
Arts based research: It is often said that an individual can best express what she or he is feeling through art. Giving the women complete autonomy or freedom when asking them to use art as a mode of expressing themselves can be of huge advantage management. This method would also be beneficial in terms of understanding the difference in how every woman feels. How PPD influences every woman in unique ways would be shed much light upon as every woman would be giving some different interpretation regarding their problems or the adversities they face every day. This means that a possible trend might be understood so that probable precautions may be taken to prevent from these situations to even happening.
Apart from these methods several other methods like body mapping or online research can also be done. Online research has the advantage of being able to reach people who do not live nearby by using the internet. This would help the women to talk to the researchers without being physical present there, and this would also help the women to ne more comfortable to talk without having to face them in face.
A group of 200 women who have either mental health problems in the past or are suffering from now have been identified. All of them are in different stages of pregnancy and some of them have underwent childbirth a few weeks to a two months prior to the research.
The data that is collected from different surveys and interviews are all very intimate and personal. The research must not reproduce these data anywhere in any form without prior notice to the, or consent of the owners of the data. Every research should have an ethical base that would set the moral compass of the research and this paper is no different (Cohen, Manion and Morrison 2013). Confidentiality must be maintained in the research and whatever data is to be analyzed, must be done so with the permission of the people who provided the data.
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The proposed paper will help the immigrant women suffering from PPD in many ways by trying to understand their problems and their own perceptions about their hardships or the things and methods that they believe would help them to get out of this situations (Zhao et al. 2013). The paper would be successfully delivering a more personal account of the women and unique care plan can be made based on the results and the collected data. But this paper has some limitations of its own, as is true with any research paper of methodologies. The obvious problem, that is also the biggest setback of the research, is that it has only focused upon a group of women in a specific country (Banks and Zeitlyn 2015). This is a huge problem and limitation because of the sheer fact that this cannot give enough data. Every country that has immigrants provide each individual with a different set of problems as well as well as privileges. The laws of the countries prove to be problematic for some, while others find it in favor of their lifestyle and views or ideologies they believe in are in cohesion with the operations and constitution of the hosting country. What must be kept in mind is that every country runs in its own way and every rule and law is different in every country. This disparity across the countries pose the obvious problem of not being all taken into account. Another very important side to this problem is that every country has immigrants from multiple countries (Ganann et al. 2016). This means everyone comes from different backgrounds and the ideologies and beliefs of every individual is different. This also becomes a problem since the moral strata of some individual are bound to clash with the state. This clash results in social and political seclusion for many and often intensifies the effects of PPD on the women.
For the lack of funds, time and other resources all of the immigration cases and situations or conditions could not be observed, which means the results of the paper and the recommendations are only partially true: they are right in some cases, but may be completely different in other spheres, where a whole different set of parameters are in play. While it is not possible to analyze every single event, it must be tried to reduce that defect as much as possible (Dennis and Dowswell 2013).
Conclusion
PPD is a serious issue that needs to be talked about more. Some women face extreme difficulties, having unable to do any of their daily work and constrain her own movements by confining herself mentally. This needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. As severe as their problem is, the issue is more serious for immigrant women. Their ordeal is much given the fact they do not have the privilege of living in their country and the emotional ground is already vulnerable. This research is focused on trying to look into the psychological aspect of the immigrant women suffering from PPD and is aimed towards trying to understand things from a theoretical point of view and using a more compassionate way of approach, rather than just looking for the numbers. Hence, all the researchers need is, a little sympathy for those who are suffering.
References
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Zhao, Y., Kane, I., Wang, J., Shen, B., Luo, J. and Shi, S., 2015. Combined use of the Postpartum Depression Screening Scale (PDSS) and Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) to identify antenatal depression among Chinese pregnant women with obstetric complications. Psychiatry research, 226(1), pp.113-119.
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