Katrine Røhder defends her PhD thesis at the Department of Psychology

Candidate
Katrine Røhder

Title
“Caregiving Representations among Mothers with Severe Mental Illness: A Perinatal study”.The Thesis will be available for reading at the Library of Social Science, Gothersgade 140, 1353 Copenhagen K.

Time and venue
Friday the 9th February 2018 at 13:00. University of Copenhagen, Centre for Health and Society, Øster Farimagsgade 5A, 1353 Copenhagen K, room 18.01.11. Kindly note that the defence will start precisely at the announced time.

Assessment Committee

• Associate Professor Mette Væver, Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen (chair)
• Senior Lecturer Judy Walsh, School of Psychology, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
• Associate professor Kari Slinning, University of Oslo, Norway.

Abstract
Katrine Røhder has in her PhD thesis explored the significance of severe maternal mental illness for the development of early motherhood as it develops during pregnancy and 16 weeks postnatal. Previous research has demonstrated that the mother´s internal prenatal representations of the child and herself as a mother can predict the quality of mother-infant interaction as well as infant attachment classification at one year. In the thesis prenatal caregiving representations are explored among women with a history of schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis, bipolar disorder, current or recurrent moderate to severe depression, and a control group of women without mental illness. The study is longitudinal, and both factors of significance for prenatal caregiving representations and the predictive validity of prenatal caregiving representations for the quality of the mother´s behavior in interaction with the infant 16 week after the birth are explored. The results in the thesis suggest opportunities associated with including prenatal caregiving representations in preventive interventions among pregnant women with severe mental illness. The study is part of the WARM study.