Establishment of a mother-and-baby-unit in the psychiatrie ward of the Rotterdam Academie Hospital has made it much easier to provide effective management for patients suffering from puerperal psychosis. This provided also new possibilities to study some relational aspects of these patients.
Ten mentally ill puerperal women have been compared with ten non puerperal psychotic women. No difference could be found in the relationship between the women and their spouses of the two clusters of patients. In nearly all cases the relationship could be described as ambivalent enmeshment. From a relational point of view there seems to be evidence to consider these patients as suffering from an enmeshment reaction syndrome. Further investigations are required to confirm this hypothesis.