Paper Short Abstract:

My fieldwork in an obstetrics hospital in Shanghai in 2023 revealed that the label and risks of “perinatal depression” diagnosed by certain medical scales and popularized by the “psycho-boom” in urban China may not align with the everyday experiences and understandings of the women being researched.

Paper Abstract:

About 20% of women who initiated prenatal care in an obstetrics hospital in Shanghai, China in June 2023 screened positive for depression or anxiety, or had a mental illness history, showing the risks of perinatal depression. However, my preliminary ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews, and informal conversations with perinatal women, their families, and hospital staff found that these women felt optimistic about these risks - “I do not have these problems” or “it’s within my control,” and they and their families held little knowledge about what perinatal depression meant for their everyday lives. The hospital staff needed to inform perinatal women of these risks and refer them to the psychological counseling clinic. But merely a few of them followed the psychological nurse’s suggestions. This phenomenon is embedded in complicated Chinese sociocultural circumstances, such as stigma toward mental illness, focus on physical rather than mental health, attention to the fetus or newborn not the perinatal woman, the misleading name of “postpartum” depression, and a lack of education on mental illness. These labels and related risks diagnosed by certain medical scales like the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS), General Anxiety Scale-7 (GAS-7), and Self-rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) and popularized by the recent “psycho-boom” in urban China may not align with the everyday needs, experiences, and understandings of the women being researched.