Current state and practical recommendations on reproductive mental health: a narrative review

ABSTRACT

Emotional disorders (EDs) are highly prevalent during the reproductive period, including pregnancy, postpartum, and women undergoing fertility treatments. International guidelines are increasingly suggesting the need to evaluate, prevent, and treat EDs in those women. The main aim of this narrative review is to summarize current practice in the field of EDs management during fertility treatments, pregnancy, and the postpartum and to propose a new technology-based model of care that helps to provide psychological care to all women who are in these periods. Four different databases (Pubmed, Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Science) were consulted. Selected keywords were related with infertility, pregnancy, postpartum, EDs, assessment, prevention, treatment, and technologies. We identified 1603 studies and 43 were included in this review. According to these studies, different face-to-face protocols already exist to manage EDs in women undergoing fertility treatments, pregnant or at the postpartum. We noticed an increased interest in developing technology-based solutions to overcome the limitations of traditional mental healthcare services. However, we also detected some issues in the use of technologies (i.e. increased attention to the postpartum or the lack of transdiagnostic approaches). Our results evidenced that there is still a need to develop modern, well-designed, and conceptually-relevant ICT-based programs to be used in women undergoing fertility treatments, pregnant or at the postpartum.

KEYWORDS:

• eHealth
• emotional disorders
• face-to-face barriers
• perinatal women’s mental health
• pregnancy
• postpartum
• infertility
• psychological programs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data availability is not applicable to this review article as no datasets were generated or analyzed in conducting the review.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universitat Jaume I [PREDOC/2018/43]; Gobierno de Aragón “Departamento de Ciencia, Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento” [research group grant S31_23R].