New Research Findings

1. Psychological Treatment of PND is Effective
This paper was an RCT comparing cognitive therapy with less specialized psychological interventions. All were demonstrated as superior to conventional routine care. There are relatively few such studies and this one had the added strengths of a broad community sample, formal clinical diagnosis of depression, manualised interventions and well-validated rating instruments.
Reference
Milgrom, J., Negri, L.M., Gemmill, A.W., McNeil, M. & Martin, P.R. (2005). A Randomised Controlled Trial of Psychological Interventions for Postnatal Depression. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 44 (4), 529-542.Milgrom, J.,

2. Reliable Identification of PND
Before this paper there had been large screening studies of PND on the one hand and there had been validation studies for PND screening tools on the other. This was the first study to validate a widely used tool in a large representative Australian population against gold-standard diagnostic criteria.
Reference
Negri, L., Ericksen, J.E. & Gemmill, A.W (2005). Screening for Postnatal Depression in Routine Primary Care: Properties of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale in an Australian Community. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 39(8), 745-751.

3. Acceptability of Screening for PND
Well-informed Cost-Utility decisions about healthcare screening procedures require several crucial pieces of information including information on the acceptability to patients. A longstanding and important gap in research into perinatal depression screening was addressed by the following two papers:
References
Buist, A., Condon, J., Brooks, J., Speelman, C., Milgrom, J., Hayes, B., Ellwood, D., Barnett, B., Kowalenko, N., Matthey, S., Austin, M-P. & Bilszta, J. (2006). Acceptability of Routine Screening for Postnatal Depression. Journal of Affective Disorders, 93: 233-237.
Gemmill, A.W. Leigh, B., Ericksen, J., & Milgrom, J. (In press) A survey of the clinical acceptability of screening for postnatal depression in depressed and non-depressed women. BMC Public Health, Acceptance recommended 20/07/2006.

4. Depression and the Stress of Parenthood
With this paper, we are the first researchers to show that even when PND is treated effectively, this does not reverse the accompanying stress that mediates the many of the negative effects of PND on the mother-infant relationship and ultimately infant development.
References
Milgrom, J., Ericksen, J., McCarthy, R.M. & Gemmill, A.W. (In press). Stressful impact of depression on early mother-infant relations. Stress and Health, 22 Accepted 23/02/06