Is bergamot oil beneficial for peripartum depression?

A single study provides some indication that bergamot essential oil (BEO) aromatherapy might have positive effects on mood in postpartum women. This four-week RCT of sixty postpartum women in Taiwan, which gave the participants 15 minutes of daily aromatherapy with either BEO or plain water vapor, found that the women who received BEO had significantly lower scores on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS).^[1] However, it’s important to note that the EPDS is not a mood quantifier but a screening scale for peripartum depression; the average scores of all of the groups at all times were lower than the cutoff for possible depression, and the study didn’t report on the number of participants in each group who scored over the cutoff. (Assuming a normal distribution, it can be inferred from the average and standard deviation that many more participants in the control group had scores above the cutoff, but it’s impossible to tell whether this is significant.) So, despite the significant difference in EPDS scores between the BEO and water groups that this study reported, it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions about the effects of BEO on mood in postpartum women or its efficacy for peripartum depression. More research is needed.