Perinatal Psychosis: Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Treatment

Dear Colleagues,

Perinatal psychosis (PP) is a rare but severe mental health condition affecting 1–2 in every 1000 mothers. Characterized by sudden onset, symptoms may include delusions, hallucinations, mood disturbances, and disorganized thinking. If untreated, PP can lead to tragic outcomes, such as suicidal attempts. Perinatal psychosis can also severely disrupt family wellbeing, causing emotional distress, role strain, and rela-tionship challenges. Fathers often experience anxiety, depression, and caregiver burden, while children may be affected by instability and reduced parental attention, resulting in poor child health outcomes. 

Despite its seriousness and its known impacts, PP remains underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, and highly stigmatized, especially within low-resource settings where access to mental health care is limited.

This Special Issue seeks to advance the knowledge-base around its epidemiology, course of illness, impact across the family, its awareness, identification, detection, and linked health services within low-resource and culturally diverse contexts. We aim to gather evidence on prevalence, timely detection, diagnostic challenges, risk factors (including genetic, hormonal, and psychosocial contributors) and treatment ap-proaches.

We welcome studies providing evidence on perinatal psychosis in relation to parents, children, and the wider community, including prevalence, parental mental health, parent–infant bonding, child develop-ment, and impact on relationships. Research on both pharmacological and psychosocial treatment and management is also encouraged, particularly community-based and non-specialist-delivered approaches.

We also invite submissions addressing cultural perceptions, barriers to care, and stigma, alongside con-text-specific and culturally sensitive interventions, welcoming original research, reviews, clinical trials, policy analyses, narratives, qualitative studies, case reports, and implementation research.

We especially encourage work highlighting policy implications, innovative practices, and advocacy ef-forts to improve access and quality of care.

By covering a wide range of perspectives from etiology to policy, this Special Issue aims to improve un-derstanding around PP, its care, and reduce the burden of perinatal psychosis globally with both policy and practice shift.

Dr. Nusrat Husain
Dr. Siham Sikander
Guest Editors

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• perinatal psychosis
• post partum psychosis
• perinatal psychosis detection tools
• pharmacological treatment
• psycho-social interventions
• community based care
• community support
• perinatal mental health
• puerperal psychosis