Postpartum Psychosis Is an Endocrine Event

Let's rewind.

It was January 2023.

We have a 32-year-old labor and delivery nurse.

She's about eight months postpartum.

Unfortunately, she develops what appears to be something like postpartum psychosis.

Now, I don't know if That was ever an official diagnosis.

I don't believe it was.

That is more or less what I've been hearing through the grapevine and reading in the news.

This woman, in the four months prior to what she ends up succumbing to, she's seeking help.

She's in a state of anxiety, insomnia, depression.

She's got three little ones at home, husband's working.

She ultimately gets prescribed about 13 different psych meds by multiple providers over this period of time.

Her final diagnosis at trial, according to the perinatal psychiatrist who studied nothing else, they're the ones saying postpartum psychosis.

This woman's name is Lindsay Clancy, and she's become unfortunately rather infamous in many ways.

And it's a startling story because I think there is things that could have happened that potentially just maybe could have changed the outcome to some degree.

Furthermore, I think we can educate around that and speak around that a little bit more.

I've seen so many of you providers out there talking around this.

I think it's in the zeitgeist enough to where it's like, okay, yeah, clearly we all feel like something could have been done.

I'll kind of continue here.

The condition, again, that she was in, this postpartum psychosis, she was cycled through essentially SSRIs, benzodiazepines, sleeping medications, trazodone.

I want to sit with this idea that I think For so many women throughout their lives, but in particular in postpartum, it feels like there's just such a gap of treatment and monitoring in some ways.

And I think the treatments themselves are even not as appropriate as maybe they could be.

i'm not saying that a woman in postpartum psychosis shouldn't receive some of these medications in certain needs and areas it's certainly a emergency event they should go to a hospital a psychiatric hospital in particular but again if postpartum psychosis is fundamentally a endocrine event it's a hormone issue and basically every, to my knowledge, every relatively serious researcher agrees with that, then I think the standard of care just needs to change a little bit.

It needs to be built around, in particular, prevention, right? I'm not here saying HRT is what we should use for a woman who's in the midst of postpartum psychosis.

I don't think that's very reasonable, especially if we don't have any studies around that at all.