Judicial interface with perinatal depression in India: an empirical analysis and thematic review of published judgments.

In the absence of health law policies focused on perinatal depression (PND) in India, it has primarily remained a biomedical research matter instead of being understood from the human rights perspective. Also, the interplay between PND and the Indian justice delivery system remains unexplored. Hence, it is imperative to understand the medico-legal milieu of PND through the lens of judicial interface with the facet of PND. Most popular Indian electronic legal databases were used to identify the judgments pronounced by the Indian Courts where the PND quotient was involved. The text of the resultant judgments was individually read to evaluate if if the subject claim were affected by PND quotient to fit the inclusion criteria. Using the inductive and latent thematic approach, the different emergent themes from the subject claims of every single judgment were used for developing codes. Myriad themes emerged out of the analysis, which helped identify how PND vastly impacts the justice delivery system in varied types of cases in India. Obliviousness and lack of awareness in Indian judiciary regarding PND, and its consequences was largely observed. Human rights violations were discerned owing to absence of perinatal mental health (PMH) services. This policy gap, in turn, results in absence of data regarding women affected by PND and about administered treatment (if any) for managing PND, and reduced empathy by the law enforcement agencies. The resultant themes depict the urgent and multidimensional benefits of introducing policies for PMH services, which will help create awareness about the human rights dimension of PND amongst the law enforcement agencies including the Indian judiciary, and police.

Perinatal mental health and the justice delivery system in India.

On 20 April 2022 the Sessions Court of Greater Mumbai sentenced a postpartum depressed woman to lifetime imprisonment for abandoning and murdering her twin girl child (In re: The State of Maharashtra). In the absence of a diagnosis or treatment for postpartum depression at the time when the crime was committed, a plea of insanity was denied. This article considers how the absence of services for perinatal mental health in India may challenge the delivery of criminal justice in cases of infanticide.