Safety of using psychotropics during the perinatal period | Primary care latest updates

Shared on behalf of Qurat Haider at Grand Union CMHT:

Dear colleagues,

Thank you for your help in looking after women suffering with mental health difficulties during their perinatal period. As a perinatal service we truly appreciate your support and look forward to working collaboratively with you and aim to improve access to personalised and better care for this client group.

As a service we have noticed how perinatal service users have benefitted from your care although recently we have also noticed that a good proportion of service users were being referred, after psychotropics were discontinued or patients were discouraged to use them whilst being pregnant or breast feeding. This most likely stemmed from worries about side effects caused by psychotropics to the baby. When psychotropics are discontinued or not commenced at the indicated time, in most cases this leads to a worsening of symptoms. This also meant that occasionally the service user had to battle a more treatment resistant illness, subsequent to the delay in initiation or the discontinuation of psychotropics.

The Perinatal mental health team in Northampton - Campbell House, would like to take this opportunity to share a couple of videos we have produced, with information regarding ‘Safety of using psychotropics during the perinatal period’. We hope you will find these helpful.

Here are the links to the videos we have worked on:

Intro: https://youtu.be/g4CEA0TE1VY

Antidepressant: https://youtu.be/komLfrqa4Wc

The aim of this service improvement project:

• Is not to ask or expect colleagues in the primary care services, to stop referring patients to a perinatal mental health team, or to ‘do our job’. It really is about sharing information regarding the safety of prescribing psychotropics and actually encouraging you to contact us when in doubt. We love talking about psychotropic use and their safety in a perinatal service user.
• Where indicated, to reduce the number of service users discontinuing psychotropic medication/s & improve initiation of psychotropics during the perinatal period in a primary care setting.

We appreciate that not all classes of psychotropics have been covered in the material shared. This is work in progress and the eventual aim is to continue working on it for a more comprehensive piece of work.