Mindful Musings
Soffer & Associates Blog
As a new parent, I had an insatiable number of questions about my child and my
parenting - am I doing this, right? Is my baby OK? Is there a better way to do this? No matter how many questions were answered, I always had more. In between our early pediatrician visits I filled up the Notes App on my phone with new questions for our next visit. Most of the time, I had already spent hours googling, asking friends, calling the on-call nursing service to ask the same questions to try and somehow get answers for my never-ending list. Many women in my clinical practice suffer from postpartum anxiety or depression. This means that in the year postpartum women (and/or sometimes their partners) might be worrying excessively, suffering from insomnia, experiencing low appetite, navigating fears about many aspects of life, experiencing physical symptoms or panic attacks, having persistently low mood, feeling overwhelmed, crying frequently, feeling irritable or apathetic, experiencing mood swings along with a range of other symptoms. When someone's default is compromised because of her emotional state, it can be particularly hard in this digital age that we live in to trust oneself and her decisions when everything out there seems to contradict. If you google "when to sleep train" you might find 20 articles saying different things about when, if and how. The rates of postpartum and pregnancy-related mood disorders are higher than many people realize ...
Suicide is one of the three leading cause of maternal death around the world. Bleeding and hypertension were number 1 and 2. The peak risk for suicide in this study was 7 to 9 months postpartum. (Dell & O'Brien. 2003) Who is at risk for postpartum mental health mood disorder?
Why talk about these statistics?
Our hope is that if we can help people understand how common these symptoms are, particularly in the first year of life, identify the symptoms, and take a more proactive approach it will facilitate parents getting the help they need more often. Med-Psych’s Parent Consultation approach is to both address the concern you have for your child from a medical perspective as well as help you identify whether there are parenting/psychological issues at play that impact your current struggle. Whether a parent is experiencing a postpartum mental health disorder or simply something that is coming up for him/her surrounding a particular parenting struggle, we appreciate how important it is to help our clients understand their own reaction to the issue so that it can be most effectively addressed. We know just how hard parenting is, and are here to help you through. By Ariella Soffer, Ph.D. |
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September 2024
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