Most new moms don’t think they’re depressed. They think they’re tired. They think this is just what it feels like now, and that they should push through it.
So they do. Back to work, back to meetings, back to performing normally, while quietly struggling with something that never got caught because nobody was looking for it.
When the benefits structure doesn’t match the reality of what new moms are going through, this is what happens.
The six-week myth
The standard follow-up after birth is a six-week OB appointment. After that, care is largely patient-initiated, which means a mom has to recognize something is wrong, decide to ask for help, navigate her way to the right provider, and follow through. All while running on no sleep, with a newborn who needs her constantly, and a return-to-work deadline on the horizon.
It’s a setup that was never going to work well for mental health.
According to a 2025 Harris Poll survey of more than 4,000 U.S. adults, 84% of women say the standard six-week postpartum checkup falls short. Only 24% of women who have given birth felt they received enough information or resources on postpartum depression. More than half said they received none, or not enough.
Why recognition alone isn’t enough
Even when women do recognize something is off, they often don’t reach out.
In a recent Levanto review, 76% of members who reported symptoms consistent with postpartum depression did not follow up with a clinician on their own, even after flagging that something was wrong. In each of those cases, it was Levanto’s care team that stepped in to bridge that connection.
Better benefit design can make a difference here, because right now, the entire weight of that distance between recognizing a problem and getting real help falls on the mom.
When women are connected to proactive support instead, check-ins that ask about her, nurses who follow up when something seems off, the story changes. They attend their postpartum visits. They return to work. They stay.
It lasts longer than the benefit does
Clinically, postpartum depression is most common in the first four months after birth. But it can surface much later. Women are still presenting symptoms at eight, nine, ten months postpartum, and many of them don’t connect what they’re feeling to childbirth anymore because they’re so far from it.
The postpartum period, by some emerging research, extends far longer than the six-week window that most benefits are designed around. Those consequences show up in productivity, attendance, and turnover often long before anyone connects them back to a birth that happened months ago.
Guardian Life’s 2024 Mind, Body, and Wallet report tracked a 215% increase in short-term disability leaves tied to postpartum depression between 2020 and 2023. Mathematica’s research puts the national cost of untreated perinatal mood disorders at $14.2 billion annually, driven largely by productivity loss — absenteeism, presenteeism, and women leaving the workforce entirely.
The physical and the mental are not separate problems
One thing that often goes unsaid: postpartum mental health is connected to everything else happening in a new mom’s body.
Lactation challenges can spiral into anxiety. Pelvic floor issues affect how a woman moves through the world, her confidence, her comfort. Physical pain after birth is a documented predictor of depression. Contrary to popular belief, these aren’t separate tracks — they’re the same experience, and treating them in isolation is part of why support falls short.
When care is coordinated across the physical and the mental, outcomes improve. When the benefit is designed to look at the whole person instead of just ticking the postpartum box at six weeks, things genuinely get better.
What better design looks like
The goal isn’t to build something complicated, but rather to extend support through the whole first year, not just the first six weeks.
That means proactive check-ins that ask how mom is doing instead of just how the baby is sleeping. It means care teams who know what early warning signs look like and proactively follow up before things escalate. It means access to therapy or psychiatric care measured in days versus months. And it means treating postpartum depression for what it is — depression — with the same coordinated, ongoing support that any mental health condition deserves.
Return-to-work coaching matters here too. The transition back is its own stressor, and women who feel prepared for it are more likely to come back and stay. That’s good for the employee and measurable in retention numbers.
Most benefits leaders already know postpartum mental health matters. The next step is making sure the benefit design actually prioritizes it.
Levanto offers integrated postpartum and mental health support designed to meet new moms where they are, from proactive check-ins and nurse care advocates to coordinated therapy, psychiatry, and return-to-work coaching.
