Breastfeeding and Depression

Pregnancy and postpartum depression frequently occurances, and thatdepressed women at pregnancy are usually depressed at the postpartum period.A literature review was conducted in the electronic databases PubMed andGoogle Scholar using the index terms “breast feeding” and “pregnancydepression” and “postpartum depression”, and “hormones”. Two investigatorsindependently evaluated the titles and abstracts in a first stage and the full textin a second stage review. All types of studies were included for this study, suchas randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, literature reviews, and pilotstudies published between 2010 and 2021. This search resulted in 12 papers.The literature consistently shows that breastfeeding provides a wide range ofbenefits for both the child and the mother. The psychological benefits for themother are still in need of further research. Breastfeeding can promotehormonal processes that protect mothers against postpartum depression byattenuating cortisol response to stress. However, the mother whom giving birththen directly breastfeeding their child, will reduce the mothers stress.