The characteristics and health needs of pregnant women with schizophrenia compared with bipolar disorder and affective psychoses

Most women with psychotic disorders and bipolar disorders have children but their pregnancies are at risk of adverse psychiatric and fetal outcome. The extent of modifiable risk factors – both clinical and socio-demographic – is unclear as most studies have used administrative data or recruited from specialist tertiary referral clinics. We therefore aimed to investigate the socio-demographic and clinical characteristics of an epidemiologically representative cohort of pregnant women with affective and non-affective severe mental illness.