|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
When LaRenee gave birth to her daughter in March 2020, her world shut down overnight from the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving her cut off from many of the support services and social networks that are vital to new mothers. Soon afterwards, LaRenee experienced another type of shut down, a psychological crisis that cast her into a spiral of self-doubt and distressing thoughts.
“It got to the point where something was really wrong with me,” LaRenee said. “And everything I did was wrong. And basically (thinking) I should never have become a mother, my kid hates me or it’s too hard to raise a kid. I was feeling those types of things within the first six months.”
Recognizing that she needed help, LaRenee entered a program referred to her by a social worker. It was the Maternal Outreach Mood Services (MOMS) program at El Camino Health in Mountain View – an intensive outpatient program that provides counseling, education and evaluation services for women experiencing symptoms of perinatal depression and anxiety. In severe cases, the program involves acute treatment and partial hospitalization.
LaRenee said the MOMS program gave her with the tools needed to manage postpartum depression. It also helped her recognize that she was not alone. “It made me realize that I’m not the only one going through postpartum. I’m not the only one that has these thoughts of being a failure, or I’m not the only one that doesn’t have much support at home or outside the home,” LaRenee said.
As National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month comes to an end, El Camino Health is promoting many of its programs that are particularly beneficial to vulnerable populations – MOMS being among them. Approximately one in eight women experience symptoms of postpartum depression. Yet, there still is reluctance to seek treatment for it, particularly in minority communities where mental health issues often are not discussed openly.
“One of the biggest barriers to treatment is stigma,” said Nicole Tarui, a perinatal psychiatrist and medical director of the MOMS program. “A lot of patients I work with from minority communities perceive mental health conditions as being a personal failure or something that they’ve done wrong. That kind of shame and guilt around that really prevents people from engaging in treatment,” she said, adding that access to medical care was another significant deterrent.
Tarui credits her familial history as part of her inspiration for going into the field of maternal mental health. As a first-generation Korean and Japanese American, she saw a lot of women in her family experience postpartum depression and anxiety, but didn’t have the awareness or resources to seek help. Their experiences as immigrants also directed a lot of their energy towards survival, where being honest about their feelings was not a real possibility, Tarui said.
Tarui’s familial history echoes the experiences of many women who participate in the MOMS program, including LaRenee’s. She only recently learned that her mother experienced postpartum depression too, a discovery that LaRenee attributes to a reluctance in Black communities to acknowledge vulnerability and a need for outside help. “It’s something we don’t speak about. It’s something that we handle amongst ourselves or with God,” she said.
To help foster self-awareness and potentially halt the transmission of trauma in intergenerational relationships, Tarui described a specialized type of therapy, known as infant-parent psychotherapy, integrated into the MOMS program. The therapy aims to understand a parent’s history, what they have been through and how this might surface in their interactions with their baby.
“We know that if a parent is able to reflect on challenges and to really be thinking about the infant’s experience, we could potentially set the foundation for this infant to have a positive attachment to the parent,” Tarui said. Early intervention can also prevent adverse childhood events, bringing down the number of risk factors for poor mental health later in life.
Early intervention is one of the goals of National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, as women from minority communities typically wait six or seven months to receive treatment for postpartum depression. By that point, their symptoms are quite severe, Tarui said.
This tracks with LaRenee’s experiences, as her daughter turned 7 months old the same week she started the MOMS program. Now she said she wants to bring more awareness to the issue of postpartum depression, particularly its early onsets, so that new and expectant mothers do not wait so long for treatment.
“I promote it as much as I can, especially in my community. And if I see a friend of mine or on Facebook, if there’s a lot of videos or topics or anything like that being thrown around, I try to communicate like ‘Yeah, this is a thing you might be experiencing, postpartum, and you should really go get help,'” she said.
