When a woman miscarries, it’s typically far more hurtful than helpful to say something like, “At least you have other children.” Now, new research backs that up and goes a step further, finding that even women who go on to welcome a child after a miscarriage or stillbirth report prolonged depression and anxiety surrounding their loss.
“We kind of assumed in the academic world that if you have a healthy baby, everything would be fine,” says Emma Robertson Blackmore, the lead researcher and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center.
Each year, about 1 million U.S. women endure a miscarriage or stillbirth. Up to 80% of those women get pregnant again, but researchers found that nearly 13% of women who had a miscarriage or stillbirth before delivering a healthy baby still had symptoms of depression 33 months after the birth. Of those with two previous losses, almost 19% of new mothers had symptoms of depression within that same time span, according to the study published online this month in the British Journal of Psychiatry. Read more…