Factors Associated with Postnatal Depression among Mothers Attending at Bharatpur Hospital, Chitwan

Postnatal depression is linked with adverse outcomes for mothers, offspring, and her entire family, which stands as a significant public health problem and is often taken as a neglected issue of maternal and child health in the developing world. Postnatal depression is often falsely interpreted as common consequences related to the recent delivery. The main objective of this study is to find out the status of postnatal depression and the factors associated with it among the postnatal mothers attending at Bharatpur Hospital. Methodology. A total of 242 postnatal women were included in a hospital-based cross-sectional descriptive study. A systematic random sampling technique was done to get the sampling interval. Face to face interview technique was used for data collection, and depressive symptoms were measured by the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. Data was entered in Epi-Data and imported to SPSS for analysis. The data were summarized in terms of frequency (percentage), mean (SD), or median (IQR) as per necessity for descriptive analysis. The chi-square test and binary logistic regression were performed to find out the association between the covariates and depression status, assuming significance at p value <0.05. Results. The study revealed that the prevalence of postnatal depression was 16.9% by EPDS at cutoff point ≥12. It was found that postnatal depression was associated with current age, smoking, pressure to conceive a child, intent of pregnancy, and delivery-related complications. Conclusion. Postnatal depression within six months of delivery was found among nearly one-fifth of women, where 13.6% also had suicidal thoughts. More than half of the postnatal women had an early marriage. It is recommended that mothers with high risk should be routinely screened for postnatal depression followed by necessary interventions as well as safe motherhood counseling.