MMH Toolkit Videos
Why you should care about maternal mental health
Many providers don’t see maternal mental health screening as something that is needed, despite the high rates of mothers who suffer from depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, bipolar disorder, and psychosis during and after pregnancy. This video provides information on why it is important and what we are asking them to do.
How to screen
Now that providers know what we are asking of them, we want to teach the basics of perinatal mental health. The most important aspect of implementing perinatal mental health in a practice will be learning how to screen.
Interpreting Scores
Mental health is very delicate, and scoring the EPDS can take some getting used to, but also knowing how to talk to a parent if they’ve scored low, medium, or high, is important. We also want doctors to know where to send their client if they score above the threshold in either anxiety or depression, and what to do if they say anything other than “never” on question 10. This is very important.
Resources for patients and doctors
Aside from getting an EPDS score, we want all patients to receive a few key resources. These resources include SUNSHINE or BAILANDO (Spanish), a copy of the maternal mental health plan, and information on the maternal mental health referral network website, where they can find mental health providers and support groups.
MMH 101
As we stated before, anyone can experience MMH issues, but let’s do a deeper dive. This means that adoptive parents, non-birthing parents, caregivers, people experiencing a termination, a miscarriage or infertlity, gestational parents, and LGBTQ+ parents are also susceptible to mental illness during pregnancy or postpartum.
Speaking about MMH
Patients are often reluctant to discuss mental health conditions with family, friends, and providers for many reasons. As clinical staff are often the first to interact with women regarding screening for mental health, it is important it is done with a strength-based approach.
Comorbidities
Other common comorbidities (meaning other things people can experience along with maternal mental health) include: bipolar, PTSD, OCD, domestic violence, and substance use disorder. This is why we have included these screeners and information in this toolkit.