Recent Status of Pregnant Women with Mental Disorders at a Japanese Perinatal Center

Introduction: Recently, we have been providing comprehensive treatment for pregnant women with mental disorders involving specialists from multiple fields in cooperation with local administrative agencies. In this study, we examined the outcomes of treatment for women with perinatal mental disorders in our institute to evaluate the effect of our recent approach to improve perinatal mental health.

Methods: We retrospectively compared the outcomes between pregnant women with mental disorders who delivered from April 2015 to March 2017 with those from April 2009 to March 2011. We examined the following: presence or absence of necessity of medication, self-interruption of medication, deterioration/relapse of mental disorders, and administrative support.

Results: There was no significant difference in the rate of pregnant women with mental disorders between the two periods (3.2 versus 3.2%, respectively, p = .94). The rates of patients requiring medication and those with self-interruption of medication did not reach significance (p = .90 and .19, respectively) between the two periods; however, the rate of patients with deterioration/relapse of mental disorders decreased significantly during pregnancy and postpartum (20.3 versus 10.7 and 7.3 versus 1.7%, p = .04 and .03, respectively). On the other hand, the patients receiving administrative supports increased significantly over the total study period (p < .01).

Conclusions: It was suggested that our recent active management of pregnant women with mental disorders might have contributed to prevent the deterioration/relapse of mental disorders during pregnancy and postpartum.