A new medication is now available to treat postpartum depression, or PPD. The drug, called zuranolone, takes a different approach to PPD treatment. To understand how it works, we spoke with Dr. Arundhati Headrick, a reproductive psychiatrist at the OHSU Center for Women’s Health. She shared four things you need to know. 

1) Zuranolone is a fast-acting treatment taken in a 14-day course.

“SSRIs – which are medications like Prozac and Zoloft – can take anywhere up to 8 weeks to be effective,” says Dr. Headrick. “With zuranolone, it has shown effectiveness in the first two weeks, and symptom improvement was sustained for up to 4 weeks after the 14-day course of treatment.” 

2) If you are on another antidepressant medication, you can still take zuranolone.

You don’t need to stop your current regimen and can take zuranolone in addition to your normal medication. Zuranolone works by binding to a different set of receptors in your brain than other medications commonly used to treat depression.

3. You can’t chest or breastfeed while taking zuranolone.

“There have been a few studies that have looked into how much of the medication passes into breast milk, and it turns out that it’s less than 1%,” says Dr. Headrick, “However, since we don’t know the long-term effects, and it’s still such a new medication, the recommendation is to not breastfeed for the 14 days of treatment.”  
 
If you want to continue to breastfeed or provide human milk to your baby after treatment, you would need to “pump and dump” during the 14-day course. Once completed, you can return to nursing or pumping milk to feed your baby.

4. Like all medicine, zuranolone has a few side effects.

The two most commonly reported side effects are feeling sedated or dizzy. For this reason, Dr. Headrick tells her patients not to drive or operate heavy machinery during treatment. 

One other word of caution is that zuranolone is specifically for postpartum depression, and Dr. Headrick cautions it is not approved for use in pregnancy or for major depressive disorder. Postpartum is the period from birth until baby is 12 months old. 

When to seek help for postpartum depression

PPD is not the same as the “baby blues.” While the “baby blues” is short period of time where people may feel more emotional or anxious in the early weeks after a baby is born, PPD is more intense and lasts longer. Up to 1 in 8 people who have given birth experience PPD.  

Common symptoms include: 

• Feeling severely depressed 
• Not bonding with baby 
• Struggling to enjoy things 
• Crying frequently 
• Having thoughts of self-harm 

If you have symptoms of PPD, it’s important to talk to a health care provider. They have treatment and care available.