Findings of a research work commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) with support from UKaid Foreign Commonwealth and Development office conducted in the Bawku Municipality of the Upper East Region show devastating levels of depression amongst pregnant women.
According to the data 50% of women suffer postpartum depression after childbirth. Similar work done in the national capital, Accra showed that 9% in the primary care setting, 30% at the secondary level and 41% at the tertiary level.
Interestingly, the findings also point to majority of health care givers lacking sufficient knowledge on maternal mental health disorder and are equally unaware of tools to adopt to be able to diagnose the condition.
Maternal Mental Health conditions, including anxiety, depression and in some instances substance use remain the most prominent complications of pregnancy, child birth and postpartum; affecting 1 in 5 women.
Majority of these cases go untreated. A phenomenon that remains a major source of concern for many actors in the health sector.
Complications of Maternal Mental Health include preterm birth, brain and other developmental delays of the children, negatively affects the mother’s bonding with the child, stunted growth with 20% of death of women after delivery being as a result of suicide.
In addressing the challenges that come with Maternal Mental Health, various actors are calling for awareness creation on the prevalence of the condition.
Speaking to Journalists on the sidelines of a dissemination meeting for Maternal Mental Health Situational Analysis in Ghana-Northern Zone which had health officials from Upper East, North East, Northern and Upper West Regions attending, Dr. Promise Sefogah, WHO Lead Consultant for the Maternal Mental Health Situation Analysis in Ghana explained that to successfully deal with condition, Ghana urgently needs an Integrated Maternal Mental Health Policy.
Dr. Sefogah, notes that such a policy will streamline the preventive, treatment care giving measures to be able to reduce the incidence of Maternal Mental Health cases.
“Let’s join to call on the Ministry of Health to hasten steps to get the policy in place so that in Ghana it becomes a policy that when every woman gets pregnant, as they go through the antenatal, we take their screening.
We do the questioning and if they have a risk, we get the mental health staff to attend to her so we can detect early and then intervene to optimize the outcome of the pregnant woman, her baby and then society at large,” he stated.
On his part, Dr. Martin Boamah, Technical Officer Maternal and Child Health WHO-Ghana, explained that there is the need for interventions must be rolled out to integrate care across all levels of the welfare chain.
“Having disseminated these findings from the situational analysis, the next step is to put interventions to address the issue. And one of the things we intend to do is to come out with a comprehensive package that addresses maternal mental health issues. We are looking at integrating the interventions right through all the levels of the healthcare – right from the community through to the tertiary facilities”.
