For the first month of her pregnancy, Beth and her husband, John, were ecstatic. Conception had been hard-won after a year of attempts by natural means and a second year of difficult, expensive infertility treatment.

But by the second month, Beth knew something was wrong beyond the vomiting.

"I felt like I was having a heart attack," she says. Her obstetrician, baffled by her symptoms, did not know where to refer her.

"It was a complete, 24-hour panic," recalls Beth, a Los Angeles preschool teacher. "One Sunday, in the middle of the night, my husband called the hospital to tell them I was having a heart attack. They said it sounded psychological and that they couldn't help me. . . . I didn't know what was wrong with me."

Beth was suffering from panic disorder, a psychiatric condition that affects a small percentage of pregnant women. She was also depressed, a condition that affects at least 10% of pregnant women--some of whom are so severely depressed that they must be treated by a psychiatrist or be hospitalized.

Psychiatric disorders in pregnant women is a phenomenon that only a handful of psychiatrists have specialized in over the last decade. There is a dearth of knowledge in psychiatry and obstetrics about pregnant women afflicted with psychiatric disorders, says Dr. Vivien Burt, founder and director of the Women's Life Center, a branch of UCLA Medical Center's Neuropsychiatric Institute, which specializes in treating psychiatric conditions that afflict women from menstruation through post-menopause. (Mostly, what has been written about pregnancy and depression concerns postpartum depression.)

Although American women experience depression or anxiety disorders twice as frequently as men--with the greatest number of cases during childbearing years--Burt says many pregnant women are misdiagnosed or mistreated. The result can be protracted suffering for the mother, danger for the baby and a higher risk of postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis.

"I don't think we're as tuned into it as we should be," says Dr. Johanna Abernathy, a member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

"It's difficult for many of us to recognize whether or not (symptoms are) a real problem or if it's just related to a lot of things that occur during pregnancy, such as anxiety, irritability and high emotions," she says.