Dr. Edna Lekgabe

Yeah, perinatal is when you're right in the middle of delivery and then postnatal.

That perinatal covers all three.

It's the umbrella.

So perinatal from a psychiatric point of view is from conception,

From a perinatal psychiatry point of view, but from a reproductive point of view, it's from the time you want to conceive.

The moment that baby starts appearing in your head, oh, we need to think about having a baby, clock it.

Because there might be some losses.

One in five women have a loss in pregnancy.

So there might be miscarriages.

There might be difficulty conceiving.

That needs to be captured because that leads to a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression.

Yeah, well, the brain can't tell the difference.

The pruning has been happening, right?

So the moment pregnancy occurs, the hormones have shifted, the gray matter is thinning, the deeper structures, the amygdala is rewiring, all the memory paths, the hippocampus, the seahorse, all that is changing, yeah?

And the loss might occur early on in pregnancy.

It might occur much later where the dip is at its lowest.

There's fetal death in utero, FDIUs, which is quite late in pregnancy.

They can be stillborns.

So the brain has changed.

And I feel that matricence is even more absent for those ladies because there's no baby.