Postpartum Depression: Racial Differences and Ethnic Disparities in a Tri-racial and Bi-ethnic Population

Abstract

Statistically, postpartum depression can be ranked from high to low as Native Americans, Whites, African Americans and Hispanics (Hispanics have remarkably lower depression rates). This information is critically important to clinicians, researchers, agency administrators and social workers who work with these populations.

Perinatal Depression in Minority and Underserved Rural Women

“…Confidence intervals of the rates of major and minor depression by group were estimated (Table 2), followed by statistical tests to first determine the differences among these rates and then explore the differences in variations of full scores and differences in mean full scores www.intechopen.com between groups. Risk assessment was performed with factor analysis and correlation methods (Wei et al, 2008 The major factors (and their components -original 35 factors in the PDSS holding loadings larger than 0.70; factor loadings less than 0.40 dropped; standard regression coefficients used) were identified according to the order of significance where italic (component) factors had average ratings of "agree" or "strongly agree" from the 90 likely major depressive participants. The Henry Kaiser's eigenvalue-based rule (Rule of Thumb) was used: The total number of factors is chosen as the number of eigenvalues of the correlation matrix that are larger than one (Morrison, 1990).…”

“…Major dissimilarities existed between the Hispanic group and the non-Hispanic group (Wei et al, 2008). The prevalence of depression at six weeks postpartum in a rural triracial population using the Beck and Gable PDSS found that Native American women had the highest rate of major depression (18.7%) and average rates of minor depression (10.5%).…”

“…However, for postpartum depression, www.intechopen.com samples of those studies consisted of primarily white American and African American women, leaving the depressive status of other racial/ethnic groups, e.g., Native and Hispanic Americans, essentially unknown. A main purpose of our previous studies (Baker et al, 2005;Wei et al, 2008) and the present study is to eliminate or reduce such a knowledge gap.…”

“…[2005][2006][2007]. Two previous studies on postpartum depression (Baker et al, 2005;Wei et al, 2008) and a recent analysis of the depression during pregnancy (unpublished) have demonstrated extremely high rates of postpartum depression and prenatal depression in Robeson County.…”

“…The goal of this research was two-fold: 1) to estimate the prevalence of postpartum depression for African American, Hispanic, Native American, and white women and determine any presence of racial or ethnic differences and disparities; and 2) to integrate research findings and work in concert with the case management teams for the design of more targeted and feasible admission procedures and more effective intervention strategies and treatment plans. The first analysis included 586 of the 645 women, and the main purpose was to study racial/ethnic disparities (Wei et al, 2008). The second analysis included all the 645 women, and the main purpose was to investigate the effectiveness of the program interventions and treatment plans, based on the comparison of the initial screening results with follow-up screening results.…”