**2. History**

One of the first written documents that link traumatic childbirth experience and consequential psychological disorders dates back to the nineteenth century when it was described that "disturbing and scary dreams" after childbirth usually preceded the onset of melancholic stupor [1]. It was not until a century later that more intense studying of this phenomenology began. In 1978, academic literature mentioned 10 women that, after long and painful experience of giving birth, had nightmares related to the labor [2]. Some 10 years later, other symptoms of traumatic disorder had been described, such as symptoms of intrusion, emotional numbness, and dissociation, that appeared in women who had given birth, after complicated labors with anamnesis of infertility and complicated pregnancy [3].

Along with the change of diagnostic criteria in 1994, in the DSM IV classification trauma started being characterized as a subjective experience, and childbirth as subjective traumatic experience has become a topic of research when it came to frequency and etiopathogenetic mechanisms [4]. Childbirth started being treated as death threat, current or threatening injury, or current or threatening sexual violence (Criterion A of the DSM IV classification). During childbirth, a woman can feel like there might be immediate danger to her life or to the baby, regardless of whether it is clinically justified. A woman's belief that she is in danger can lead to psychological consequences [5]. According to DSM V birth trauma can meet criterion A (one is, directly or indirectly, subjected to actual or threatening death, serious injury, and/or sexual violence), and the symptoms are grouped as intrusion, avoidance, irritability, and negative changes in mood and cognition [6].

Postpartum PTSD and its clinical presentation were described in 1995 [7], and just a year later, PTSD after childbirth had a normal course from a clinical perspective [8]. It was not until after the year 2000 that more intensive research on postpartum PTSD began, mostly in more developed countries, and later in the rest of the world.
