Pregnancy Mental Health Care Can Often End at 4–6 Weeks Postpartum.Depression Often Does Not.

This subject matters greatly to the future of women's mental and emotional health during and after pregnancy. Perinatal depression is common, serious, and still difficult to predict. In routine care, risk is usually identified through symptoms or patient disclosure after distress has already emerged. Many women minimize symptoms, feel ashamed, or lose structured contact with care after birth.

DecipHER Women is leading a Dutch prospective study with Erasmus MC, Mamamoon, and Voices for Women as part of a public-private consortium, funded via Kansrijke Start. The result would show whether biological signals measured during pregnancy and early postpartum can help identify women who may be vulnerable to perinatal depression before symptoms become severe.

The study consists of combining two blood samples, one in the second trimester and one early postpartum, with structured mood follow-up through the first year after birth.

What Your Patient Receives

• Optional access to her individual research depression risk indicator
• Structured mood check-ins through 12 months postpartum
• DecipHER women psychoeducation on mood, hormones, pregnancy, and postpartum mental health
• Free access to the Mamamoon app, including yoga instruction, breathing support, and evidence-based birth and birth trauma education to improve outcomes.
• A prompt to contact you or her GP (depending on timing) for psychological referral if mood scores suggest she may need support

Why Refer?

• Support a less stigmatizing model of maternal mental health care
• Help build a future tool that could support faster, more personalized intervention
• DecipHER women psychoeducation on mood, hormones, pregnancy, and postpartum mental health
• Help identify women who may need support before symptoms become severe
• Extend structured mood follow-up through the first postpartum year

By predicting and preventing peripartum depression through personalized hormone profiling & machine learning, we are able to make maternal mental health easier to discuss by grounding risk in biology, not blame. While also offering added support without adding burden to your load.

What This Helps Build

A clinically useful tool that helps midwives and doctors identify PPD risk earlier, choose the right level of support, save time, and make maternal mental health more biological, measurable, and actionable. Your referral helps build that future too. The only issue is the at-home finger prick kit is proving difficult for some of the markers – they may need to get a blood draw at a lab.