Perinatal Mental Health by the Numbers: What Every Health System Should Know

Perinatal mental health doesn’t always get attention in health system planning, partly because the problem is spread out. A few patients here, a few there. But when you add it up, the numbers are hard to ignore.

How many women are affected

Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, including depression and anxiety during pregnancy and after birth, affect at least one in seven women, and many estimates put it closer to one in five. That makes them the most common complication of pregnancy.

With about 3.6 million births in the U.S. each year, that’s roughly 500,000 to 700,000 women every year.

Now bring it closer to home. A hospital that delivers 3,000 babies a year can expect somewhere between 430 and 600 of those mothers to experience a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder. That’s more than one new patient every day.

How many get help

Most don’t. An estimated 75 percent of women with perinatal mental health conditions go untreated. Many are never screened. Others screen positive and are handed a phone number, and the trail ends there.

What happens when they don’t

Mental health conditions, including suicide and overdose, are now the leading underlying cause of pregnancy-related death in the United States. In the CDC’s 2022 data, they accounted for 27.7 percent of pregnancy-related deaths, up from about 22 percent the year before. Suicide alone rose from 7.4 percent to 13.2 percent of all pregnancy-related deaths.

The CDC’s maternal mortality review committees also found that 87 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable, and most of their recommendations point at providers and health systems, not individual patients.

What it costs

Mathematica estimated that untreated perinatal mood and anxiety disorders cost about $14.2 billion for one year of U.S. births, or roughly $32,000 for each affected mother and child, counting from pregnancy through the child’s fifth birthday. That includes lost productivity, preterm births, added maternal health spending, and higher rates of developmental and behavioral problems in children. We break down what that means for a health system in the business case for a perinatal mental health program.

What the numbers point to

Read together, these numbers tell a consistent story. The patients are already in your system. They’re already being seen for prenatal visits, deliveries, and postpartum checks. The gap isn’t finding them. It’s having a clear, staffed, written pathway for what happens after a positive screen.

That’s the gap Bloom was built to close. Our co-founder Lisa Tremayne helped create New Jersey’s universal perinatal screening program, the first in the nation, and then built the state’s first Center for Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders to treat the women screening uncovered. At that center, patients’ average depression scores fell from the range requiring attention to low-moderate risk within one month of care.

The Bloom Program Build brings that model to your organization as a seven-stage roadmap, with the protocols, training, and guidance to build it. If these numbers describe your patient population, start a conversation with us.