The person who made this connection may have been seeing a particular slice of life:  woman with PPD, with a really strong desire to BF.  

We've had many women who had PPD while breastfeeding.  When the breastfeeding was going badly, it tended to be spectacularly awful, and often the counselling component was not up to today's standard (I include myself here!).  The depressed woman, who already felt guilty because she "couldn't feed her baby", would give up BF and then added more guilt to her load and became even more depressed.  Plus she was being told that she couldn't take meds because of BF.

NOTE:  I use the past tense.  There are only two women in this profile on my personal caseload in fourteen years (and hundreds of women) as a public health nurse.  I remember both of them as if yesterday.  My colleagues have had similar cases in the past.  Now, all of us certainly have much better skills for BF support. The docs are now comfortable with giving meds to a BF woman.

So... for depressed women who strongly desire to BF, who are having problems with BF, and who are not getting good advice, the BF itself appears to intensify the depression.  The solution is ensuring good advice obviously.  But a practitioner who has had just a few of these memorable cases may make an assumption based on empirical data, forgetting that the depressed women whose BF went well just don't make the same impression.

My two cents worth...

Judith

Judith A. Hayman, RN, BSc, BScN, IBCLC 
Public Health Nurse, Lactation Consultant 
Haldimand-Norfolk Health Unit 

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