Diana L. Barnes
Psychotherapist in Private Practice, USATitle: Towards a New Understanding of Pregnancy Denial: The Unperceived Pregnancy as a Dissociative Disorder
Abstract
Pregnancy denial is a misunderstood reproductive anomaly that occurs in 1/475 pregnancies through 20 weeks of gestation and 1/2500 pregnancies through labor and birth. When a woman fails to perceive her own pregnancy, it can have deleterious developmental consequences for the fetus, and in extreme cases, can result in the death of the neonate within hours of birth. An integral part of moving towards understanding any disease or disorder is finding a common language by which to identify risks, assess symptoms and create protocols for treatment and prevention. This presentation addresses the distinctive pattern of symptoms and behaviors that meet diagnostic criteria for the unperceived pregnancy along with a discussion of the demographic consistencies across cases and the impact of trauma on dissociative processes that occur during birth when a pregnancy is unperceived.
Biography
Diana Barnes is an internationally recognized expert in the field of women’s reproductive mental health. She is a past president of Postpartum Support International and the current Chair of the Special Interest Group on Forensics and Maternal Mental Illness for the International Marcé Society. She also sits on the Board of the North American Society of Psychosocial Obstetrics and Gynecology. Widely published in the academic literature, she is the editor and a contributing author of the text Women’s Reproductive Mental Health Across the Lifespan and her paper on pregnancy denial is published in the Archives of Women’s Mental Health. In addition to her clinical practice, she is frequently retained by legal counsel on cases of women with maternal mental illness who are criminally charged. In 2009, Dr. Barnes received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Eli Lilly Foundation for her outstanding contributions to the field of childbearing related illness.
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