Thank you for posting this. Twenty-five years ago I had my second son and suffered by PPD, although I didn’t know what it was at the time. I thought I was just a very bad parent. He was very large and this was the only pregnancy (of four) that I had been borderline gestational diabetic. Now it all makes sense. Furthermore, the only thing that ended my PPD was that I became pregnant with another child when he was only 9-months-old and those hormones kicked in, making everything ok.
Strange, the article specifically did not seem to be referring to gestational diabetes but women who had diabetes going in. I thought diabetic women having children was considered near suicidal (Julia Roberts in “Steel Magnolias”?). Considering the population of the study, Medicaid moms in New Jersey (with all the predictable baggage that implies), lousy health, high BMI, wretched family circumstances, etc., more than average rates of depression would be a given.
But PPD does not seem to be a respecter of social status. I got the impression it either hits you or it doesn’t. But I also got the impression somewhere that it seemed to last about six months when it happens.