Introduction: One of important factors in developing postpartum depression is social support This is known that those mothers who have premature or sick babies need to earn more social support to reduce their extra anxiety during postpartum period in comparison with other members of the society. So in this study we decided to evaluate the relation between postpartum depression and the level of social support in mothers who have premature newborn infants.
methods: The current research is a descriptive-correlative study which held on 100 mums of discharged premature neonates from Shahid Sadoughi NICU in 2016. The sampling method is available case selection. A checklist reviewing social support items and postpartum depression was given to the mothers. All collected data were entered to the statistic software SPSS v.17 in order to processing by the means of analytic and descriptive statistical indices with considering p-value<0.05 as the level of significant association.
Results: The final results revealed that there were some significant association (p-value<0.05): between the number of mother’s child and her social support in 3 categories(Parents, spouse parents and all), between her husband’s job and social support in 2 categories(Wife and all) and between family economical condition and social support in 3 previously mentioned categories(Wife, relatives and all). The results of this study revealed that there is a significant association between postpartum depression and the job of mother’s husband, the educational status of mother’s husband and the economical level of mother’s family.
Conclusion:It can be concluded that the more available social support the less incidence of postpartum depression.