Talk:Postpartum blues

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 30 September 2019 and 27 October 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mlshulk. Peer reviewers: Pattkait.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:36, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Plan for major edits to article

Although this article provides a good basic overview of the topic, I believe its level of detail and readability could be improved significantly. This is of particular importance given how well-developed its most closely related article, postpartum depression, is on wikipedia.

Therefore, I propose the following edits:

• expanding the lead section
• replacing medical jargon included under the existing symptoms section with terms that are easier to understand
• adding relevant sources throughout, as the current version lacks citations for most facts and all references are >10 years old
• expanding the causes section
• adding sections on epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention
• adding relevant wikilinks
• adding an infobox
• looking into, and developing if supported by the literature, the points made about the association with thyroid and serotonin dysfunction, as well as the "baby pinks" section

I am currently in the early stages of planning these edits, and will post an update here to cover any additional major edits. I look forward to collaborating with others, and welcome any thoughts or suggestions! Mlshulk (talk) 20:29, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

Nice work on this article!

The intro sentence is excellent, it is concise and covers all the important components of the condition. The summary is good, I think you did a nice job outlining the important points in a readable and concise way. I would consider expanding the lead a bit to include an overview of a few more sections once they are complete and consider explicitly outlining the difference between post-partum blues and depression.

The article organization is good but you could consider arranging the sections to reflect the format used in other medical articles, mainly by moving epidemiology farther down the article. There is also both a heading and subheading titled "Prevention" which could be revised to be less repetitive. Otherwise, the headings and subheadings are appropriate and easy to navigate. As for granular typographical recommendations, usually citations are placed after periods and Wiki formatting only capitalizes the first letter of a heading (Differential diagnosis vs Differential Diagnosis).

The content itself is excellent, very well-written and clear to a wide audience. I think it covers all the important components of the topic, however it may be worth being more explicit about the difference between postpartum depression and blues. Based on this article it sounds like duration is the biggest factor, but maybe comment on symptom severity if there is any literature on that. I also was wondering about diagnostic criteria since you mentioned the prevalence that varied based on criteria but then did not mention any in the respective section. I know it is not a DSM diagnosis, but maybe mention some of the criteria used in research.

It has appropriate links to other wiki pages, however I would consider removing the link on the following text, “can mimic or worsen psychiatric symptoms” as it is not clear why this sentence needs a link and the page is not directly relevant. I was also confused by the sentence, “However, given similar causes of postpartum blues and postpartum depression in women, it may be relevant to examine rates of postpartum depression in men.” It wasn’t clear to me how the causes of postpartum depression in women is relevant to men, although this may be better elucidated after the "Cause" section is complete. You may even consider adding the meta-analysis about the prevalence in men to the epidemiology section as these seems like a somewhat minor and unsettled area of discussion and research to have its own section, although I’m not convinced this is the best route to go. Otherwise, the medical language, balance and tone are excellent. I am not sure that an image would add valuable content to the page but could be considered.

Your references are excellent, they seem complete especially given the limited literature on the topic. The article is well-cited and there is minimal primary literature. For a new article, this provided an excellent overview of the topic and complimented the postpartum depression page well. I think the title and content is relevant and will be well-utilized.

Thanks for your contributions! Pattkait (talk) 13:15, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Proposed title change

After some consideration, I think it would be beneficial to change the title of this article from maternity blues to postpartum blues. Below is my reasoning:

• Based on a pubmed search of major reviews of the topic, most articles use the term "postpartum blues". There is consistent use of this term across multiple disciplines of medical journals, including psychiatry, OB-GYN, and primary care. Organizations such as ACOG also use the term postpartum blues in their official online literature. I considered the possibility of these terms being used with different frequencies based on the authors' country of origin, but did not find significant evidence for this as articles from India and by the WHO used the term postpartum blues ^{1, 2}.

• Postpartum blues mirrors the language of postpartum depression, which is the more severe and well-known about condition on the spectrum of postpartum psychiatric conditions. Using similar terminology helps with searches and increasing visibility of the sub-clinical condition.

I was surprised that, of the three terms, postpartum blues has the fewest number of hits on search engines. As of 10/9/19, postpartum blues has 2.9 million hits on Google, compared to 11.5 million for maternity blues, and nearly 250 million for baby blues. The ratios are similar on Yahoo and Bing search engines. One reason for a significantly higher number of hits for the term baby blues is that there is an American comic strip by the same name. I was tempted to use the term baby blues because of how common it is, both in daily language and in the search engines; however, it is the most colloquial of the three and often is used in quotations which was unappealing for this context.

I plan to redirect both baby blues and maternity blues searches to this new title. For any objections to this title change, please post on this talk page.

References:
1. Rai, Shashi; Pathak, Abhishek; Sharma, Indira (2015). "Postpartum psychiatric disorders: Early diagnosis and management". Indian Journal of Psychiatry. 57 (Suppl 2): S216–221. doi:10.4103/0019-5545.161481. ISSN 0019-5545. PMC 4539865. PMID 26330638.

2. Robertson, E., Celasun, N., and Stewart, D.E. (2003). Risk factors for postpartum depression. In Stewart, D.E., Robertson, E., Dennis, C.-L., Grace, S.L., & Wallington, T. (2003). Postpartum depression: Literature review of risk factors and interventions. https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/mmh%26chd_chapter_1.pdf. Accessed 13 October 2019.

Mlshulk (talk) 00:53, 14 October 2019 (UTC)