In this week’s episode of our podcast So Glad You Asked, Allie and I sit down with Lee Cohen, MD, and Kristin Lasseter, MD, to talk about the treatment of postpartum depression. Dr. Cohen is the Founder and Director of the Ammon-Pinizzotto Center for Women’s Mental Health (CWMH) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Kristin Lasseter, MD, is a reproductive psychiatrist practicing in Austin, Texas, and the creator of a thriving social media presence: @the.reproductive.psychiatrist on Instagram and the.repro.psych on TikTok.
We really enjoyed making this episode. For me, it felt special — a kind of intergenerational exploration of postpartum depression. Let me explain what I mean.
When I joined the Center for Women’s Mental Health in 1996, perinatal psychiatry was still a very young field. There were only a handful of clinical programs in the country focused on the care of women with mood and anxiety disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period. I was fortunate to join the program at MGH, which was founded by Lee Cohen, MD, one of the founding figures of perinatal and reproductive psychiatry as a distinct field of medicine.
As the Center’s founder, Dr. Cohen was committed not only to delivering top-notch care to patients, but also to bringing knowledge and research in this field to a wider audience of providers and patients looking for up-to-date information. Back then, disseminating reliable information was old-school. Dr. Cohen published widely in the medical literature and lectured at medical and scientific conferences around the world. To support providers and patients who could not attend those conferences, our research assistant, Aoife, spent so much of her time printing out journal articles, stuffing them into envelopes, and mailing them to clinicians and families in every corner of the globe.
By the time I joined the group, the internet was just becoming a viable way to share reliable medical information. The Mayo Clinic had launched its first website in 1995 and was an established leader in online education for providers and patients. We wondered whether we could build something similar for our own field — a website dedicated entirely to perinatal psychiatry — and in 2001 we launched womensmentalhealth.org, and I became its editor-in-chief.
That was 25 years ago, and a great deal has changed. Which brings us to Kristin Lasseter, MD, who has built a large following by creating a stream of catchy, evidence-based, clinically grounded videos for social media. She is successfully using this platform to quickly deliver reliable information to an even wider audience.
Whether you read the original research, listen to a lecture, visit our website, or follow Dr. Lasseter on Instagram, you will hear the same message: women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders need and deserve treatment. In this episode, we focus on postpartum depression and its treatment. We discuss:
- How to recognize postpartum depression
- When to ask for help and where to go
- What are effective treatments for postpartum depression, including therapy and medication
- What women and families can do to prevent postpartum depression
It was a pleasure to have this conversation with Drs. Cohen and Lasseter, and we hope that you also enjoy this episode. Thanks so much for joining us!
—Ruta Nonacs, MD PhD
