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Illustration: Caitlin-Marie Miner Ong
This past April, only a few weeks postpartum, my son's pediatrician handed me a print out of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). The screening tool, developed in Scotland in 1987, is 10 questions long and used around the world to detect a variety of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs) such as postpartum depression or postpartum anxiety.
The form's prompts range from "I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things" to "The thought of harming myself has occurred to me." Each answer is assigned a numerical value. The higher the score, the more likely the respondent is suffering from a PMAD.