Oates et al. (2004) found in their cross-cultural study about maternal depressive symptoms postpartum in 11 countries from five continents, that the mother-in-law could be a source of unhappiness for new mothers following

childbirth in all selleck involved countries, except Sweden. According to Klanin and Arthur (2007), sex preference in favour of sons is deeply ingrained in Asian countries. Many researchers from Asian countries have reported a direct association between an infant’s female sex and postpartum depression (Chandran, Tharyan, Muliyil & Abraham, 2002; Patel, Rodrigues, & de Souza, 2002), which includes Bangladesh (Gausia, Fisher, Ali, &

Oosthuizen, 2009). Qualitative NLG919 clinical trial studies about women’s own experiences of depressive symptoms postpartum are rare in low- and middle-income countries. In a phenomenological study, Gao, Chan, You, and Li (2009) found that the depressed mothers in China felt physically and emotionally exhausted, they perceived themselves as incompetent mothers, and they experienced dissonance between tradition and modernity and between expectations and reality. The practice “of doing the month”—postpartum rules which women comply with to restore balance after childbirth (Eberhard-Gran et al., 2010), the daughter-in-law/mother-in-law relationship, the sex of the baby, and the one-child policy

contributed to their depression, according to the mothers (Gao et al., 2009). In a qualitative study in India, mothers reported that the most common explanation for the mother’s feelings of depression was economic causes and a poor relationship with family members, particularly the husband and mother-in-law (Rodrigues, Patel, Jaswal, & de Souza, 2003). In Ethiopia, new mothers with postpartum mental distress experienced disappointment and exclusion, an exacerbation of pre-existing problems, and felt vulnerable the and exposed to danger (Hanlon et al., 2009). Due to the high prevalence of depressive symptoms in rural Bangladeshi women (Gausia et al., 2009; Nasreen, Kabir Nahar, Forsell, & Edhborg, 2011) and low numbers of qualitative studies from South Asia, particularly from rural Bangladesh, about new mothers’ experiences of postpartum mental health, further research is needed to get a better understanding of the kind of support and health services that should be developed to address the challenge. In this study, we aimed to explore and describe the experiences and concerns during the first 3–9 months following childbirth of those mothers who showed depressive symptoms 2–3 months postpartum, in a rural area in Bangladesh.