WASHINGTON (NewsNation) — The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline, which helps new mothers struggling with mental health challenges, celebrated its first anniversary over the weekend.
The most common complications of pregnancy and childbirth all involve mental health, and experts in the field say maternal mental health is underfunded, under-researched and highly stigmatized.
However, it is finally getting the attention of the federal government, encouraging moms to talk about it.
Expecting and new parents who feel overwhelmed or are experiencing depression and anxiety, as well as their loved ones, should reach out to the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262) for support and resources.
“We know that women often don’t speak up or say what they’re going through,” Catherine Oakar said.
Oakar, a special assistant to the president for Public Health and Disparities, is part of the White House effort to expand the around-the-clock confidential hotline for moms feeling overwhelmed, anxious, depressed or experiencing a mental health crisis.
Connecting moms with trained professionals, the national hotline received thousands of calls and texts each month in its first year.
Oakar said the large response to the hotline says a lot about the state of maternal mental health in this country.
“Maternal mental health complications are the number one complication of pregnancy and postpartum, affecting one in five women. This is a huge issue,” she said.
Reproductive health is a huge issue in the U.S. — the only high-income country with a rising maternal mortality rate.
In 2021, there were nearly 33 deaths for every 100,000 births in the U.S., according to the CDC. And the rates for women of color are two to three times higher than for white women, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported.
“Something is clearly wrong and we have to do better,” Oakar said.
Harvard researcher Dr. Sharon Dekel, the director of the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Research Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, is developing a tool normally used to screen veterans of war to detect childbirth PTSD in new moms.
“We do know that the idea of disclosing the trauma, for people who have PTSD, that’s a symptom. People do not disclose,” Dekel said. “They feel embarrassed, they feel ashamed. The shame, the guilt, ‘I failed my baby.'”
That hits close to home for NewsNation’s Allison Harris.
Despite years covering stories of combat veterans struggling with PTSD, Harris never imagined the panic attacks she’d been having in the weeks following her daughter’s birth were signs of psychological trauma.
It turns out, the complications Harris dealt with at the end of pregnancy, delivering early via emergency C-section and the days her daughter spent on a breathing machine in the neonatal intensive care unit were all indicators.
“If we screen people for PTSD, then I think people would actually feel comfortable to share their stories,” Dekel told NewsNation.
She said even just providing a safe space for new moms to share a short story, 300 words on their birthing experience, can be effective in identifying whether they’ve experienced psychological trauma.
Both researchers and the Biden administration are trying to shed this stigma around maternal mental health.
The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline has been approved for $10 million in funding a year through 2027.
