Okay, so I appreciate you sticking around for my "Between The Lines" segment. This is a really big conversation that I just had with Kelly return about postpartum mood and anxiety disorders. So she mentioned the term PMADs. So we're gonna talk about PMADs a little bit in my little rant 'between the lines'. So postpartum mood and anxiety disorders affect about one in seven pregnant and postpartum women, birthing people nationwide, making it the most common obstetric complication. So that's a big deal. It's the most common and there are many obstetric complications. So this is huge to know these conditions often go undiagnosed and untreated despite the existence of screening tools and effective treatments. So what are the screening tools that we're using? The reality is we're not using screening tools with any consistency or regularity. In fact, do you want to know who's screening for postpartum mood disorders? It's the pediatrician that sees people when they're bringing their babies in for care after delivery. And sometimes that's two days postpartum. Sometimes that's two weeks. And that's it. It's one time that people are being screened. Now, is this consistent across the board with every pediatrician? No, it's not. And you want to know why? Because pediatricians are not being reimbursed for this. And so therefore, they're not taking the extra time to do it. In my area locally, I can give you an example of maybe two providers that are doing this with any kind of regularity. And they're not being paid for it. So in reality, only 50% of perinatal people who are diagnosed with depression receive any kind of treatment. So we talked a little bit in the podcast, about 6.5% to 20% of people have postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, only half of them are being treated. What are we doing with the rest of them, so half of them are being treated, and the rest are just being smacked on the backside and told, "see you later have a nice life?" When left untreated, PMADs can become a multi generational issue that negatively affects the mother and the child's long term physical, emotional and developmental health. Are you hearing me on this? This is a big deal. This is not just about I have an issue right now, and everything is sunny on the other side of this, I get one year out postpartum and everything just shuts off. That's not how this works. And being that PMADs are the number one complication of pregnancy and childbirth. And they affect up to one in seven pregnant and postpartum people. But we're only helping half of the people that are actually diagnosed, what is happening to the rest of them? What is happening to families? Is anybody getting that this is a huge deal that we're just leaving to, I don't know, blow in the wind? So a company called Mathematica did a research study that went over five years started in 2017, and it looked at the societal effects of PMADs that are undiagnosed and treated for families, and they're stating that was an estimated $14.2 billion spent for all births in 2017. Or lost, if you want to look at it that way. $14.2 billion for all births in 2017. Half of perinatal people with a diagnosis of depression do not get the treatment they need. Half. So what the research does show is that children of mothers with PMADs have a higher risk of behavioral and developmental disorders, including ADD and ADHD, depression, anxiety, behavioral conduct disorders like Oppositional Defiant Disorder, that kind of thing. Mothers with PMADs have a higher risk of suicide of cesarean deliveries, of work absenteeism, and among other things in the workplace, lower labor force participation in genera. And they're likely to make more mistakes at work. So depending on the kind of work you do, this can be fatal. That's just for mothers, right? So if we look at the effect of children, an increased risk of low birth weight or preterm birth are those babies whose mothers have an issue of mood and anxiety disorders especially that are untreated. Lower likelihood of being breastfed. An increased risk of sudden death syndrome, sudden infant death syndrome. That's huge. Increased risk of behavioral and developmental disorders, and an increased likelihood of worse child health outcomes. So more injuries, more asthma, fewer preventative visits, and certainly obesity is on that list as well. So what are we doing here? It looks as though the cost is significant. Mathematica broke this down stating that the average cost per mother/child pair in this 2017 study was $32,000. So the per mother cost was $19,500, and certainly this $32,000 was about a mother with PMADs for her and her child over a six year time frame. So what they're estimating is 60% of these costs are attributed to maternal outcomes. Okay, so stay with me here. 60% of the detriment is happening to these postpartum delivering people. Okay, so I'm trying to be inclusive. And it's not just about women, but postpartum people in general, okay. There's a huge and substantial societal cost of not treating and not taking care of these people. And okay, so maybe some of the impact is to employers and healthcare payers, and maybe smaller people like you and I, maybe we should say, We don't care, why do we care. But if you're somebody that owns a company that has a large population of birthing people, you do care, because you're losing costs, and potentially losing productivity, and potentially having people get injured and killed because they're not being able to focus. Several medical societies insist, okay, so some of these medical societies are like the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, the Association of Women's Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses. So they're recommending that people are consistently screened and are given comprehensive treatment when they're diagnosed with pre meds. So all of these organizations are recommending this treatment, and yet half of these people aren't getting it, what's falling between the cracks? What are we missing? So if this isn't hitting home to you, if you aren't starting to see the bigger picture here of why this is such a monumental problem, first of all, I can't help you. But second of all, why are we not talking about this? As we forced women to have babies that maybe they don't really want to have, I say maybe to be generous with forcing people to have babies. But we still haven't addressed these problems. And we still haven't come up with a plan for how we're going to help people postpartum. And what we're going to do for the society that breaks down because nobody's helping these people. Like seriously, is anybody listening? Like is anybody paying attention to any of this is this thing on?