10/15/2026
**A sincere plea to psychiatric practitioners who evaluate and black treat mothers.**
PLEASE, when clinically appropriate, document postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and the relationship between psychiatric symptoms and childbirth.
Too often, mothers are diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, or other psychiatric conditions without any documentation of when their symptoms began or their connection to the postpartum period.
I'm not asking anyone to change a diagnosis to fit a narrative. **I'm asking you not to leave the postpartum connection out when it is clinically relevant.**
When that connection isn't documented or appropriately coded, we risk losing critical information in our data, research, treatment planning, and funding decisions.
I sit in meetings where I repeatedly hear, **"Postpartum psychosis is rare."**
And I keep asking myself: **How accurately are we counting these mothers if we're not consistently identifying and documenting them?**
A mother can have a serious psychiatric disorder AND experience a postpartum psychiatric episode. Both deserve clinical consideration.
Please assess it. Document it. Code it appropriately when supported.
**We cannot accurately measure what we fail to identify. And we cannot adequately address a crisis we aren't fully capturing.**
Lakeisha M. Hunt, BSN, RN
Founder | GRL Family Crisis Center
*BLACK Postpartum Crisis Prevention*
