Need for Psychological support during pregnancy

Pregnancy, beautiful gift of nature, brings about varied physiological (somatic) and psychological changes to a woman.  Men also undergo some changes, but we will deal with this later.  Pregnancy is a complex phenomenon which also includes social changes.  First pregnancy represents a powerful psychological event.  Lets understand the psychological changes in the course of pregnancy.

Likely changes during pregnancy

Pregnancy is always associated with changes in psychological functioning of pregnant women. It is usually associated with ambivalence, frequent mood changes, varying from anxiety, fatigue, exhaustion, sleepiness, depressive reactions to excitement.

During pregnancy, changes include body appearance, affectionate and sexuality, whereas the position and role of women attains a new quality. Even thoughts of pregnancy can bring about numerous worries about its course and outcome, and especially of the delivery itself, which may be so intense that they acquire a features of phobia (which may be the reason for avoiding pregnancy).

Motherhood, resulting from pregnancy, brings about several positive psychological changes as well, like emotional bonding with the child, affection, feel of family, joy.   Socially, in some countries, motherhood provides special status to women.

Relationship change is another aspect, a social change, affects not only the expecting mother, but also others closely associated with her.

Postpartum depression is another aspect of pregnancy usually requires psychological help.

Conclusion

Pregnancy is an event that involves numerous somatic and psychological changes. However, pregnancy can also be a potent stressor. Existence of prenatal maternal stress may lead to different perinatal complications that may have long-term consequences on the newborn. In prevention of maternal stress emphasis has to be put on partner's emotional support, as well as empathy of the social environment. However, in certain cases, professional psychotherapeutic support is necessary, in form of short supportive treatment. Preventive measures should include adequate psychological support during pregnancy, especially the first one, provided for all pregnant women, but also for those women that plan to get pregnant in the near future.

Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet of Things (IoT) is the new buzz word!! This is an attempt to have the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.   IoT has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and the Internet.

Network of computers, aka Internet, are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code.   Such manual mega effort is unstructured, mostly wasted.  This resulted in social area like facebook, resulted in structured data.  In order to use such massive data, aka big data, brought in analytics, pattern matching.  Hadoop, similar technologies helped analyse such information.

What to expect?

Recently wearable flood the market, smart watch, iWatch etc are getting popularity.  Such gears identify location, temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and similar information about individual.  Imagine, a cardiac patient requires constant monitoring of pulse, analysis of pulse help determine the condition of the heart.  Based on the threshold setup, such information can be transmitted to the doctor automatically along with several other parameters like body temperature, environment, blood pressure, exact location of the individual.  Even, device can receive instruction to handle the emergency, alert ambulance.... essentially save a life in this emergency situation.

Second example, imagine a smart home having smart devices like fans or air conditioner based on sensors operate to to regulate temperature.  Similarly, washing machine can fitted with sensors to connect to internet, take care of creating service requests and report exact fault.  Even better, get automatic upgrade of its intelligence!!  Your water filter can order cartridge refill automatically! Television is already hooked to internet, so it is more evolved of the device so far.

Diabetic patients know their the pain of taking insulin every day.  How fixing a device in the digestive system to release insulin based on the setting of the doctor?  Health psychology deals with a challenge of patient consuming the medication as prescribed by the doctor.  Internet of Things can help increase the compliance!

Many other usages can be listed!!  The list is huge.

My view

Internet of Things are expanding the networking of devices, according to one study, 2 billion devices are expected to be interacting by 2016.  This humongous blast of information generates several petabytes of information. Life style of human being is set to change towards greater automation.  Such a change also has social challenges, relationship challenges, basic human challenges.  You need to decide to what extent this is useful or barging in to your privacy!!!  Only time will tell!!

Internet of Things are here to challenge human smartness for sure!  In this battle of smartness and intelligence, lets see who wins.

Depression

Depression is a common mental disorder, characterized by sadness, loss of interest or pleasure, feelings of guilt or low self-worth, disturbed sleep or appetite, feelings of tiredness, and poor concentration.

Depression can be long-lasting or recurrent, substantially impairing an individual’s ability to function at work or school or cope with daily life. At its most severe, depression can lead to suicide. When mild, people can be treated without medicines but when depression is moderate or severe they may need medication and professional talking treatments.

Depression is a disorder that can be reliably diagnosed and treated by non-specialists as part of primary health care. Specialist care is needed for a small proportion of individuals with complicated depression or those who do not respond to first-line treatments.

Levels of depression

Mild or no depression indicates that you are not suffering from depression or that what you are feeling are signs of depression within the normal range of human experience. 

Mild to Moderate Depression All of us are apt to experience at least mild to moderate levels of depression due to environmental or situation factors that are less than favorable. Feelings of depression from time to time are normal. What's most important is our ability to cope with that depression, resolve it's contributing factors and elevate our mood and thinking to a more positive state. Failure to resolve moderate depression can result in stress-related illness and interfere with sleep, work, family, and social functions.

It's best to get help or do whatever it takes to resolve feelings of depression as soon as possible, as left untended depression will build on itself and become deeper and harder to deal with.

Moderately Severe to Severe Depression should be treated as an illness and professional attention should be sought. Severe depression is a debilitating disorder that interferes with sleep, work, family, and social functions, leading to great impairment and isolation. Severe depression is treatable and treatment can help people lead productive and fulfilling lives.

Visit your mental health care professional to seek care.

Are you hypnotised?

Every life event is stored as an experience in our conscious mind, while sleeping this is prioritized and stored in subconscious or unconscious mind.  Unless required recall of subconscious experience is restricted.  There is managed by a filter/layer.  Hypnosis is one such tool manages to breach this layer.

During a session with hypnotherapist, you could experience accessing your subconscious mind to understand or resolve conflicts/issues.  But, certain emotions also enable you to similar experiences.

Imagine you are at grief, have you wondered why do you recollect all the events, which otherwise not accessible?  Similarly the case in anger, we recollect all the points against a person whom we are fighting?  Meet someone after long time, all nostalgic moments pop.

You are basically breaching this barrier in such emotional states.  Try and place your feedback!!