The Relationship between psychosocial health status and risk of depression among pregnant women in Turkey

Background & aim: Pregnancy involves physiological, psychological, and social changes, in which women are expected to adapt to the biopsychosocial changes. Failure to make such an adaptation would be accompanied by an increased risk of prenatal depression in pregnant women. This study was conducted to determine the relationship between psychosocial health status and the risk of depression in pregnant women.  Methods: This descriptive-analytic study was carried out on 792 pregnant women (i.e., 73, 369, and 350 cases in the first, second, and third trimesters, respectively) referring to the Outpatient Clinic of the Meram Medical Faculty Hospital, Necmettin Erbakan University, Turkey, from 22 March to 30 June 2016. The pregnant women who attended the outpatient clinic and met the inclusion criteria were selected using haphazard sampling, as a non-probability sampling method. The data were collected through a researcher-made questionnaire, the Pregnancy Psychosocial Health Assessment Scale (PPHAS), and the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Data analysis was performed in SPSS software (version 22) using descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney U test, and Kruskal Wallis test.  Results: The pregnant women had the depression risk of 28.2% and mean depression score of 9.41±4.8. The total mean score of PPHAS was obtained as 4.05±0.45. The risk of depression showed a statistically negative relationship with the total and sub-dimension mean scores of PPHAS, as well as the mean EPDS score (P˂0.001).   Conclusion: Pregnant women with lower psychosocial health status were more likely to have the risk of depression. In other words, the risk of depression in pregnant women was influenced by factors that determine their psychosocial health.