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Competing Interests: Les auteurs n’ont déclaré aucun conflit d’intérêts en relation avec cet article.

Emotional disorders are common during the perinatal period and can have negative consequences on the woman's physical and mental health, as well as on the mother-child relationship. Screening for these difficulties is complicated because of a lack of knowledge and a lack of simple and validated tools that can be used on a large scale. A Geneva multidisciplinary team has developed a prenatal interview model, provided by specifically trained midwives. It aims to sensitize pregnant women, offer them a personalized space of listening, detect psychological weakness, develop resources and orient patients in need to specific care centers. This paper describes this interview and its main implications for clinical practice.

The detection of postpartum depression (PPD) is an important public health issue because of its negative consequences on both the mother's and the infant's health. Up to now, one of the major difficulties is to find a simple and valid instrument able to detect women at risk to develop PPD already during pregnancy. The present article describes a short, simple questionnaire that was developed in Geneva, the Questionnaire de Dépistage Anténatal du risque de Dépression du Postpartum (DAD-P), previously named le Questionnaire de Genève. The authors propose a preventive strategy and follow-up that can be used by any health professional working with pregnant women.

Until today postpartum depression (PPD) remains too often banalised or misknown by the population who is frequently badly informed. Actually it is an important public health problem because it concerns more than one new mother out of ten without this pathology being diagnosed nor treated. The consequences of this depression can be serious both for the mother and for the child with latter developmental difficulties. Since several years, a Genevian team of child psychiatrists has been working on this problem and developed a screening questionnaire to identify women at risk to develop PPD. A preventive method of dynamic psychotherapy is presently being developed and implemented to the at-risk women with the collaboration of the Genevian gynaecologists.

The main innovation of the year 2004 was the introduction of a new, second-generation antipsychotic drug with a new mechanism of action (partial dopamine agonist), encouraging first clinical results, and an advantageous clinical tolerance profile. Additionally, three new galenic forms are presented: an oral, extended-release form of methylphenidate that could be useful in the treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders; an intramuscular depot form of a second-generation antipsychotic drug (risperidone) with the advantage of improving adherence; and an intramuscular form of a second generation antipsychotic (olanzapine) that is valuable in emergency situations. Finally, we will briefly give an update on the advantages of lamotrigine in bipolar depression.