LIBERTY Postpartum-depression workshop set for June 9

Eighty percent of women experience emotional problems after giving birth.
By WILLIAM K. ALCORN
VINDICATOR HEALTH WRITER
LIBERTY -- Why mothers kill their babies is the subject of a workshop for health-care professionals, "Post-Partum Psychiatric Disorders and Infanticide: From Blues to Breakdown," on June 9 at the Holiday Inn MetroPlex.
Eighty percent of women experience some emotional difficulty after a birth, ranging from the "baby blues," which is normally fleeting and doesn't require treatment, to about 15 percent who have severe postpartum depression, which at its worst has resulted in child murder, said Kimberly Resnick Anderson, a psychiatric social worker.
Anderson is owner of Clinical Concepts in Sexual Health in Liberty, which is sponsoring the event along with the Center for Behavioral Medicine at Forum Health. She majored in marketing and advertising at American University in Washington, D.C., earned a master's degree in social work at Case Western Reserve, and did five years of postgraduate work at the Center of Marital and Sexual Health in Cleveland.
Father, daughter to speak
The main speakers for the workshop, which runs from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., are Anderson, who will talk about postpartum psychiatric disorders in two morning sessions; and her father, Dr. Phillip J. Resnick, an internationally known forensic psychiatrist, who will talk about infanticide and child murder in the two afternoon meetings.
Dr. Resnick, who Anderson said wrote the definitive articles on the classification of child murder by parents and coined the word neonaticide, has provided expert testimony in several high-profile cases in which mothers were accused of killing their babies, including those of Andrea Yates, Susan Smith and Amy Grossberg.
In late May, Dr. Resnick, accompanied by his daughter who is doing clinical research on postpartum depression, traveled to Tyler, Texas, to determine if he will be a consultant in the case of Deanna Laney, who is accused of beating the heads of her three sons, two of whom died. The third was critically injured.
"If he is contacted, he will evaluate, and if he doesn't feel he can be of help, he won't do it. That's why he's highly respected," Anderson said of her father.
Backgrounds
Dr. Resnick is director of the Division of Forensic Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University and past president of the American Academy of Psychiatry. Anderson, who speaks locally and nationally to mental-health and medical audiences on sexual and reproductive topics, has served as an adjunct instructor at Case Western Reserve's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.
The cost of the workshop, which is also open to the community, is $85 per person; $70 per person for groups of 10 or more; and $60 per person for students. Friday is the deadline for reservations, which can be made by calling (330) 884-3923.