Postpartum psychosis is one of the most severe psychiatric emergencies in medicine. It strikes 1 to 2 of every 1,000 new mothers, usually within days or weeks, or months of delivery, and carries a high risk of suicide and infanticide when it goes unrecognized. Yet the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the handbook clinicians use to diagnose mental illness, does not list it as a distinct condition.

That gap has real consequences. Without a defined diagnosis, women with postpartum psychosis are routinely misdiagnosed and sent home without the urgent care they need. Psychiatry residents are not consistently trained to recognize it. Too many families learn what it is only after it is too late.

In October 2025, an international panel of leading women's mental health experts published a consensus statement in Biological Psychiatry. It concluded that postpartum psychosis is clinically and biologically distinct, with its own onset, symptoms, genetic risk, treatment response and prognosis. The panel recommended classifying it as a distinct diagnosis within the bipolar disorders chapter of the DSM. Patient advocacy organizations, including Postpartum Support International, support that recommendation.

The recent national attention on postpartum mental illness has shown how little the public, and too many clinicians, understand this condition. The science is ready. The DSM should be too.

We call on the American Psychiatric Association to:

1. Formally review the expert consensus recommendation and add postpartum psychosis as a distinct diagnosis in the DSM.
2. Publish a timeline for its decision, so mothers, families and clinicians know this is being taken seriously.

Every mother deserves a diagnosis that matches what she is experiencing. Please sign and share.

— Gabriel Levin, Founding Partner, The Levin Firm