Psychosocial aspects of Taiwanese postpartum depression phenomenological approach: a preliminary report

To understand how Taiwanese women experience postpartum depression, a phenomenological study was conducted. A purposive sample of six mothers participated in the present study. All the subjects' interviews were tape recorded and then transcribed. The transcription of each subject's oral description of postpartum depression experience was analyzed using Colaizzi's phenomenological methodology. Three categories, with ten themes, were derived from the analysis. The first category is unbalanced role-enacting. It includes these four themes: (1) the discrepancies in the husband-wife relationship; (2) the shadowy position of a daughter-in-law; (3) the incompetence as a mother; and (4) the dilemma of a woman's identity. The second category is fragmented time-space representation. The themes included are: (5) cultural bondage; (6) loss of ideals; and (7) reinterpretation of family history. The third category is the uneasy self. It contains the themes of: (8) psychological disability; (9) sense of self-dissatisfaction; and (10) the notion or behavior of destruction.