While your friends excitedly chatter about how lovely your skin looks, what an absolute glow you have about you and your impending delivery date, all you can think about is how overwhelmed you feel about the whole pregnancy. Every mention of an aspect of pregnancy sends your heartbeat soaring right along with your anxiety. “This isn’t normal,” you think to yourself, your head now spinning with worry and circling thoughts.

What you may find reassuring is that half of all pregnant women worry and experience some anxiety. This is completely normal considering the life changes you are facing. It is only an average of about 9.5 percent of women who may experience the more serious symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, with panic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder coming in distant seconds.

Depression and Pregnancy

Then there are eating disorders, bipolar disorder, perinatal depression, and recurrent major depression that will affect mood during pregnancy in some women.  Researchers believe that perinatal depression is one of the most common mood disorders women may experience, during, or after pregnancy. As much as 20 percent of pregnant women experience some form of depression, from minor to major.

Factors that increase the likelihood of depression are a history of drug abuse or depression; anxiety about the fetus; inadequate support from family or friends; family history of mental illness; problems with previous pregnancy or birth, and marital or financial problems.

And there’s a study that proposes that children with moms who were experiencing depression during pregnancy have a one and a half times greater chance of being plagued by depression by age 18. The thinking behind this theory is that there are physiological responses to this depression that may pass through the placenta and influence the brain development of the fetus.