Psychiatric Morbidity Among Pregnant Women

Abstract

Background: Most of what is known about psychiatric problems among pregnant woman comes from findings among clinical samples, often without non pregnant control groups. Furthermore, most research in this area has focused on anxiety and depressive symptoms rather than anxiety and mood disorders, and thus has not addressed the relationship between mental disorder diagnoses and perinatal out come.

Aims: This study aims to find psychiatric morbidity among pregnant women and the effect of parity, gestational age, obstetric history, educational level and age of pregnant women on psychiatric morbidity.

Method: The study sample was 120 pregnant women randomly collected from primary health care centre in Alsadr city and) Ur (primary health care centre in Alshab neighborhood in Baghdad from 15^th of March to 15^th of December.

The control sample was 120 non pregnant, non puerperal married women matched for age and randomly collected from the same care centers.

GHQ-30 and semi structured interview based on DSM-VI TR were used to identify the cases.

Results: Psychiatric morbidity was 40.8 % in pregnant women versus 31.7% in control group and depression and anxiety were the highest.

Conclusion: the psychiatric morbidity was high among pregnant women, and the most frequent disorder were depression and anxiety.