[Why is it essential to diagnose and prevent postpartum depression?].

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.