title: The impact of mother's depression on her nursing experiences and attitudes during breastfeeding.
abstract: Mother's depression during postpartum is rather common and it has an impact on the mother-child relationship. As breast-feeding is an important situation for the early mother-child interaction, the impact of mother's depression on her breast-feeding and nursing attitudes and experiences was decided to be studied. In this pilot study 119 healthy primipara mothers filled in Beck's Depression Inventory, breast-feeding and childrearing attitude scales and other questionnaires. The prevalence of depression was 8%. The depressed mothers had more difficulties during breast-feeding than other mothers. The attitudes of the depressed mothers were more positive during pregnancy, but more negative during breast-feeding than those of the non-depressed mothers. The results might be clinically meaningful, although we need more detailed information about the correlations between depression and breast-feeding experiences.
authors.affiliation: Department of Public Health, University of Tampere, Finland.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tamminen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001290:Attitude; D001942:Breast Feeding; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D003863:Depression / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D005387:Finland; D006801:Humans; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D011247:Pregnancy; D011644:Puerperal Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology*