A partner's military deployment during pregnancy and the postpartum period can cause unique stressors on mothers and significantly increase the risk for adverse mental health and impaired infant bonding.
Those are the key takeaway messages from a new study in the Archives of Women's Mental Helath led by Hadas Kam Allouche, MD, and Sharon Dekel, PhD, from Mass General Brigham’s Department of Psychiatry, “Partner Military Deployment During Wartime Is Associated with Maternal Depression and Impaired Bonding: A Matched-Control Study from the Israel–Hamas War.”
Learn more about their findings and how they fit into the larger picture of their research and into maternal mental health, postpartum anxiety, depression and PTSD in the Q&A below.
What Question Were You Investigating?
We sought to understand how partner military deployment during wartime affects the mental health of pregnant and postpartum women.
To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of partners’ active deployment on maternal depression and mother–infant bonding among women exposed, both directly and indirectly, to war-related stressors.
What was Your Approach?
We recruited over 1,000 women in Israel who were pregnant or had recently given birth during the first months of the Israel–Hamas war, including 429 women with partners currently deployed or no longer in active duty.
Participants completed surveys assessing mental health symptoms, maternal–infant attachment, trauma exposure (including partner deployment), and childbirth-related factors.
Women with a partner in active military deployment were matched to those whose partner was no longer deployed—based on demographics, prior mental health, and trauma exposure—to isolate the effect of a partner's deployment on maternal outcomes.
What Did You Find?
Among pregnant women matched on background and exposure, those with a partner actively deployed were twice as likely to meet criteria for probable depression compared to those whose partner was not deployed, with depression rates reaching 44%.
Postpartum women with a deployed partner also reported greater bonding difficulties with their infants, even when accounting for prior mental health and war-related stress.
The main mechanism for this effect was reduced social support—when partners are absent due to military deployment, mothers receive less emotional and practical help, which significantly increases psychological distress during the perinatal period.
These effects are particularly pronounced in the context of collective trauma, where external stressors are high, and support systems are disrupted.
What Are the Clinical Implications?
Maternal mental health is foundational for the wellbeing of families and communities. During war, perinatal women face compounded stressors, and social support becomes a critical buffer for maintaining mental health and healthy bonding.
Our findings highlight the need for targeted screening, psychosocial support, and inclusion of maternal mental health in emergency response protocols, ensuring that pregnant and postpartum women with deployed partners are classified as a vulnerable population requiring priority attention.
What Surprised You Most?
Even though we anticipated elevated distress, the levels of psychiatric morbidity were striking.
Rates of maternal depression in our cohort ranged from 23% to 44%, far exceeding typical peacetime rates (7–9% during pregnancy and 10–15% postpartum).
This underscores the profound psychological toll of war exposure—both direct and indirect—on expectant and new mothers.
How Can We Increase Social Support for Women with Maternal Depression?
We aim to identify scalable, community-based interventions, such as:
- Mobilizing community and volunteer resources
- Establishing mother-to-mother support circles, even informal ones.
- Providing psychoeducation to normalize stress reactions and promote help-seeking.
- Delivering brief psychological first aid and group interventions via telehealth platforms to reach women in conflict zones or remote areas.
Ultimately, we advocate that maternal mental health be fully integrated into emergency and humanitarian response frameworks worldwide.
How Does This Study Fit Into Your Broader Research Program?
Our research examines the impact of trauma on maternal mental health, focusing on psychological and biological mechanisms that determine whether mothers adapt or experience psychopathology after childbirth.
We study how impaired maternal mental health can affect child development, contributing to the intergenerational transmission of trauma.
The overarching goal is to generate scientific knowledge that informs interventions to support mothers and infants living under conditions of collective trauma and conflict across the globe.
Learn More About the Dekel Lab
Through the Magnifying Glass: The Dekel Lab and the Psychiatry of Childbirth
A close-up look at the Dekel Lab, which is working to understand more about the psychiatry of childbirth.
Exploring the Mental Health Impact of COVID-19 on New Mothers
Mass General researcher Sharon Dekel, PhD, is launching a study to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting new mothers.
Helping Mothers Recover When the Psychological Trauma of Giving Birth Lingers
Although childbirth is often viewed as a uniformly happy event, it can also be a physically and psychologically stressful experience.
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