Mom and Mind | Pregnancy and Postpartum Depression & Anxiety

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77: Caribbean Mothers & Perinatal Mental Health Nov 13, 2017

Show notes

Caribbean Mothers and Perinatal Mental Health with Dr. Kendra Flores-Carter

One of the important pieces of understanding perinatal mental health, is putting it in the context of culture, immigration and other socio-cultural factors. When we use the culture to inform healing, a depth of relief and understanding happens. Today we will learn a bit more…

Today we have on Dr. Kendra Flores-Carter to discuss perinatal mental health from the lens of Caribbean mothers. As we have stated on previous episodes about culture, there are many different cultures within the Caribbean. So, this is not meant to be specific or prescriptive, rather it is information for us to keep in mind for pregnancy and postpartum.

She talks about:

*Broad cultural differences for Carribean Mothers

*How immigration and length of time in the US impacts seeking help

*Ways that Caribbean mothers may experience or express perinatal mental health difficulties

*Ways to support mothers

Dr. Flores-Carter Bio

Dr. Kendra Flores-Carter received her BA in psychology from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 2002 her MSW from Cal State, Long Beach and her Doctor of Social Work from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Dr. Flores-Carter currently works as a Maternal Child and Pediatrics Associated Clinical Social Worker. She is a proud researcher in the Perinatal Mental Health Field. Dr. Flores-Carter received her certificate in Maternal Mental Health training from Postpartum Support International and works as an expert in Maternal Mental Health.

She is a member of Arrowhead Regional Medical Center Institutional Review Board and has several research projects in the works. She has done several trainings and presentation on topics related to maternal mental health as well as other issues relating to women’s health including breastfeeding, intimate partner violence, and disparities in health care.

Dr. Flores-Carter currently serves as co-chair of the Inland Empire Maternal Mental Health Collaborative. She’s an active member Postpartum Support International, and facilitates a free monthly Postpartum Support Group for women and their families’ on-site at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center.

Dr. Flores-Carter was a recipient of the 2016 ARMC Employee Recognition Award for her effortless work to improve Maternal Mental Health care at ARMC and within the community. She also received the 2017 Golden Ida M. Cannon Award for her work to bring awareness and education on Maternal Mental Health concerns to ARMC’s Women’s Health Department.

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76: Perinatal Mental Health & the Military Family Nov 06, 2017

Show notes

Just in time to honor Veterans Day, we talk with Dr. Melinda Thiam about what life might be like for some military mamas.

In this fascinating and necessary discussion, Dr. Thiam talks with about the unique aspects of perinatal mental health in the military family.

Dr. Thiam highlights:

*The stressors for both for the perinatal mother who is in active duty and for the perinatal mother who is the spouse of an active duty person.

*She addressed the need for more healthcare providers to receive training in Perinatal Mental health to be able to help mothers.

*The need for healthcare providers to take TriCare insurance so that these mothers and families can access the care that they need.

*Understanding the stress that military life may bring and how that may impact social supports.

Resources:

Link to Book: https://www.routledge.com/Perinatal-Mental-Health-and-the-Military-Family-Identifying-and-Treating/Thiam/p/book/9781138924789

Postpartum Support International: http://www.postpartum.net/get-help/psi-support-for-military-families/

Dr. Thiam Bio

Dr. Melinda Thiam, M.D. is a board certified staff psychiatrist who was a military psychiatrist until she retired this past June 2017. She is currently splitting her time between private practice psychiatry with Future Psych Solutions in Columbia, SC and Community mental health.

During her time in pediatrics, Dr. Thiam witness the challenges of perinatal mental health for numerous spouses who had to give birth alone while their spouses were overseas serving the country. Dr. Thiam also was able to experience first-hand the challenges of being an active duty mother in the military. Through these experiences, Dr. Thiam saw many mothers suffer in silence as they found that pregnancy was not the joyous period they thought it was and new motherhood was met with darkness, sense of shame and belief that one was a ‘bad’ mother. The plight of the pregnant and postpartum mother led Dr. Thiam to switch to psychiatry with desire to specialize in women’s mental health. She initiated/led a mother-infant dyadic therapy group for last two years of residency and went on to recruit of group of perinatal mental health experts in the military/civilian population to edit manuscript Perinatal Mental Health and the Military Family: Identifying and Treating Mood and Anxiety Disorders. While this book is targeted toward military population, it is all applicable to general population and is my desire to build a practice specializing in women’s mental health/reproductive psychiatry.

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75: Expectful - Guided Meditation for Pregnancy Loss & Beyond Oct 30, 2017

Show notes

Expectful offers guided meditations for all of the transitions through motherhood from fertility, pregnancy, postpartum and motherhood. They heard feedback that many mothers who experienced pregnancy loss, didn't have guided meditation support they needed. So, they teamed up with Dr. Jessica Zucker, who is well known for her strong advocacy through the #ihadamiscarriage campaign. Together, they made a beautiful resource to help mothers to cope through guided meditations and supportive information.

It is so hard to know how to heal after a pregnancy loss. In this episode, we are talking about using guided meditations as a way to cope and heal. We honor all who have dealt with such grief and hold space, love and support for you, especially through October for Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month.

Our guests share:

-Some of the unique stress and grief that comes with pregnancy loss

-How guided meditation can support healing and give a sense of grounding through the upset of pregnancy loss.

-The importance of having a supportive community with other people who really 'get it'.

-Expectful is a resource that can be supportive to you 24/7, whenever you need.

Connect with Expectful and Dr. Jessica Zucker:

www.expectful.com

Pregnancy Loss Support Guide on Expectful https://expectful.com/pregnancy-loss-support/

IG: @expectful

FB: facebook.com/expectful

Twitter: @expectful

http://drjessicazucker.com/

IG: @ihadamiscarriage

Twitter: @DrZucker

Dr. Jessica Zucker

Dr. Jessica Zucker is a Los Angeles-based licensed clinical psychologist specializing in women’s reproductive and maternal mental health. Jessica primarily works with women struggling with fertility, pregnancy ambivalence, pregnancy loss, during transitions in motherhood, prenatal and postpartum adjustments, perinatal and postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, pregnancy and postpartum body image concerns, and in the midst of relationship challenges after the loss or birth of a child.

Mark Krassner

Mark Krassner is the founder of the fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood meditation guided meditation app, expectful. He’s an unlikely person to head this up as a 33-year-old unmarried man with no children. Expectful - a meditation web and mobile app that empowers current and soon-to-be moms to live happier, healthier lives. Mark’s mother struggled with anxiety and depression throughout her pregnancy and early parenting years. As an adult, Mark experienced the power of meditation and its positive effects on his health, relationships, and even his professional career, and it occurred to him that his childhood may have been very different for him and his mother if she had access to a meditation practice. It was this realization that led to him years of research and, eventually, Expectful was born.

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74: Resilience building in pregnancy & postpartum Oct 21, 2017

Show notes

When you can really start to understand how stress and trauma affects you on a physiological level and emotional level, you can hold more compassion and understanding for yourself.

Nkem Ndefo is on with us today, teaching, informing, shedding light on how to think realistically, holistically about stress. This is totally necessary to understand for pregnancy and postpartum...but also for pretty much everything.

Nkem is teaching us about how our bodies and minds respond to stress and ways to build resilience. There are too many gems in this episode to quote, you'll just have to soak this up when you listen. Here are some of the things Nkem discusses with us.

* Understanding how a "disorder" may actually be an "adaptive response" to stress.

* "What can we build up, what's good, what's working"... "How do we build on that and help build out the strengths?"

* "We do grow, we do get stronger, but it has to be within our window of tolerance, if it's outside of our window of tolerance its too much, it doesn't cause us to grow, it causes us to break"

* "What are the systemic factors [of stress] and what are the individual factors...one of the most damaging things we say to people is to hold them responsible for systemic factors"

* High stress in pregnancy and how that affects the mother and baby.

* Ways to support regulating the body-mind system in a supportive way, by being a partner in care.

Connect with Nkem and Lumos Transforms:

http://lumostransforms.com/

Facebook: @lumostransforms

Insta: @lumos_transforms

Twitter: @lumostransforms

Nkem Ndefo is the founder and president of Lumos Transforms and creator of The Resilience Toolkit. As Certified Nurse Midwife, Nkem holds a Master’s degree in Nursing from Frontier Nursing University. She has extensive post-graduate training in complementary health modalities and emotional therapies, including Level 3 certification in Tension/Trauma Release Exercises and Level 5 certification in Emotional Transformation Therapy.

She brings an abundance of experience as a clinician, educator, consultant, and community strategist to innovative programs that reduce stress and build resilience for individuals, organizations, and communities throughout the US.

As a clinician, Nkem has worked in settings ranging from large volume hospitals to mobile community clinics. She founded and operated a full scope midwifery and homebirth practice from 2000-2007. And she has maintained a small holistic private practice in Los Angeles since 2007. She worked for California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative researching maternal death outcomes and served on the Los Angeles County Trauma-and Resilience-Informed Systems Change Initiative Workgroup. Currently she sits on the Strategic Planning Committee for the Trauma-Informed Task Force of Greater Los Angeles

#theresiliencetoolkit #lumostransforms #buildresilience

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73: Perfection in new motherhood Oct 17, 2017

Show notes

Do you identify as a perfectionist? Do you feel like things need to be a certain way and if they aren't, you feel unsettled? How did that affect you when you were trying to conceive, during pregnancy, birthing or postpartum?

This is one of those things that really impacts the early stages of motherhood and parenthood (and all stages really). In this episode, I talk about the dynamics that I see with the mamas that I help...and one that I struggled with in my postpartum...and still work on managing. I touch on how it even impacted the recording of this episode.

Some of the things we address on this episode...

*The struggle with feeling the need to be perfect

*It seems that perfectionism often comes with a high sense of morality and conscientiousness - I believe that this makes intrusive thoughts even more unbearable.

*Perfectionism often develops as a way to cope and manage life. But that way of coping goes head to head with the challenges of new parenthood.

*The stress of perfectionism, can make getting help feel hard. Help can feel SLOW or inadequate.

*Accepting that we can't be perfect is very hard, and it's part of the key to healing.

If you identify with any of this, take a listen to the episode, give yourself a big hug and please know that this is not a judgment of you. Please know that you can find a new way to cope that is more forgiving to yourself.

If you'd like, please check out the blog post on the Postpartum Support International Blog that I mentioned: Soul Level Crisis

Please pass this episode along to any person who could benefit!

If you haven't yet subscribed to the podcast head over to www.momandmind.com

We welcome ratings, reviews, sharing the podcast and spreading the word about perinatal mental health! Lets crush this together!

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72: Social support is part of the solution Oct 09, 2017

Show notes

"It is ridiculous that when you are the person in the middle of a crisis, that you are the person who is faced to do the heavy lifting"

- Joy Twesigye

Lack of social support is a part of what is impacting perinatal and postpartum wellness. Could we start to count on our social supports more if we are giving them some fundamental info?

Joy Twesigye has a great perspective on how we can all support perinatal mothers more fully. She is talking about a fundamental need for change in the way WE, not medical or mental health professionals, but us, the people close to mamas, support mothers.

Some gems from Joy:

- Empathy for the mothers

- We can support the support people though education

- Changing our mindset to better support mothers and babies

- Not making the person who is having the crisis, do the work!!!! YES!!!!

Joy Twesigye

Joy is an impact driven health care administrator with 16 years progressive experience in health systems and policy. 2017 marks 26 years of starting and managing socially responsible organizations framed around maternal and family support, community and school-based services, and healthcare reform. In 1991, she founded The Dining Room, the first sustainable soup kitchen for Delaware, OH. In 1993, became a founding member of Andrews House, a not-for-profit community center in the same town. Joy is currently a volunteer Maryland State Co-Coordinator for Postpartum Support International, Ohio Wesleyan University Baltimore Chapter Leader and Maryland Association of School-Based Health Care board member.

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71: Pregnant & Postpartum - Soapbox Edition II - Yeah, no. Oct 02, 2017

Show notes

Pregnancy & Postpartum: Soapbox Edition II

Yeah, no. I have some thoughts about how mothers are treated....

I'm hoping back on the soapbox! And this time, I'm shouting out some of the things that the Mom & Mind listeners are upset about too! Thanks for sharing!

Let's see..most of the things I discuss are about how other peoples OPINIONS and JUDGMENTS affect mama's and partners. Can we just stop spouting out whatever comes to our mind when we see a pregnant person, or someone with a new baby? How 'bout that?!?!?!

I also touch on some potentially controversial topics related to birth, birthing justice and maybe upsetting to some medical providers. Let's just say there are mostly amazing providers and a few that are less than amazing....

As always, please come join us, listen in, share, subscribe, rate and review this podcast! Find links to places to listen at www.momandmind.com

CONNECT WITH US!

FB @momandmindpodcast

Twitter @drkaeni

Instagram @momandmind

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70: Postpartum Bipolar, "Birth of A New Brain" Sep 25, 2017

Show notes

Bipolar disorder in pregnancy and postpartum is not often discussed. Dyane Harwood is advocating for that to change. In this episode, Dyane shares her personal journey through postpartum bipolar, what she wishes people would understand and how we can all be more supportive to mothers experiencing this difficult and often misunderstood condition.

In this rich discussion, we touch on:

-Some signs, symptoms and what it may look like to others

-Insight into what it might feel like for a mother to be going through Bipolar in postpartum.

-Supportive tips on what might help in early detection, prevention and healing.

Connect with Dyane:

Twitter: @DyaneHarwood Website: www.dyaneharwood.com Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/BirthofaNewBrain Instagram: birthofanewbrain

Birth of a New Brain is available for pre-order on Amazon and Kindle. Released on October 10 2017. https://www.amazon.com/Birth-New-Brain-Postpartum-Disorder/dp/1618688014/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506311992&sr=8-1&keywords=birth+of+a+new+brain

Support and Resources:

International Bipolar Foundation (IBPF) http://www.ibpf.org (858) 598-5967 Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA) http://www.dbsalliance.org (800) 826-3632 National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) https://www.nami.org (800) 950-6264 Helpline Postpartum Support International http://www.postpartum.net (800) 944-4773 Dr. Aluwaidan Twitter: @MoAlsuwaidan Dr. Alsuwaidan's article - excellent advice for mood support/stability https://medium.com/@MoAlsuwaidan/exercise-mood-part-iii-from-science-to-action-4f668e96c83a

Dyane Harwood graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in English and American Literature. In 2007, Dyane was diagnosed with postpartum bipolar disorder (also known as bipolar, peripartum onset). Her book "Birth of aNew Brain - Healing from Postpartum Bipolar Disorder" will be published by Post Hill Press on October 10th 2017.

Dyane has been a freelance writer for twenty years and has written for the Huffington Post, Self Magazine, and Postpartum Support International. She founded a chapter of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance and facilitated support groups for moms with mood disorders for nine years. Dyane lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California with her husband Craig, their daughters Avonlea and Marilla, and their Scotch collie Lucy.

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69: Postpartum Feelings: Anger, rage, failure & guilt Sep 18, 2017

Show notes

We talk about feeling bad about our bad feelings in postpartum & pregnancy. How many of us have had feelings in pregnancy or postpartum that we didn't understand, but then also felt guilt or failure for having them at all?

Melissa Divaris Thompson, LMFT shares with us some of her personal experience and a great discussion on the roller coaster of feelings that we may have related to anger, rage, failure and guilt.

This is SUCH a common mix of feelings. Most of us don't know about this, because we don't talk about it much as a society. SO, we get in to it here! Breaking the silence on anger and rage, normalizing the pattern and reducing the stigma of having negative feelings in motherhood and feelings with our babies, relationships and ourselves.

Listen in, deepen your understanding and feel understood. We got you mamas and parents!!!!

Connect with Melissa here:

www.embracingjoy.com

www.honestmamas.com

Twitter: Embracing_Joy

Twitter: HonestMamas

Melissa Divaris Thompson, LMFT

Is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a private practice in New York City, seeing primarily women in their 20s and 30s, pregnant women, and new moms. As a holistic and depth oriented therapist, her role is to support her clients in finding wholeness — mind, body, and spirit — creating more joy, ease, and healthy relationships.

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68: Natural Disasters & Perinatal Women Sep 11, 2017

Show notes

To those of you who are living through the natural disasters all over the world right now, the Mom & Mind Podcast is with you. Especially the pregnant and postpartum mothers and new families. In this episode, i'm adding my support and a couple of thoughts and ideas of how we can support you.

This episode is proudly supported by Maternal Mental Health Now and their online, self-paced, Perinatal Mental Health Training. We all really need to be trained in this, it’s essential. I can’t even count anymore the number of mothers who have said that they can’t find the appropriate help that they need, then suffer needlessly. The format that MMH Now offers, easy to integrate in to your life and work, because you can access it at your convenience. And they offer education units to boot! Go to www.maternalmentalhealthnow.org to check out their training.

In this episode, we touch on:

*It is essential to help reduce the level of stress for pregnant and postpartum mothers, especially now, as it helps them to have healthier pregnancies, healthier babies.

*For those of us who are able, it will be essential to give what you can to local and on the ground non-profits that support these mothers and families. Diapers, formula, toys, underwear, bras, used clothes and shoes, money, shelter, support. Anything you think you’d need if you were in their position.

*People who deal with any kind of devastation may not feel the weight of their stress right away. Sometimes after they are safe is when then they feel their feelings. Let's be checking in on folks for a while, not just for the next few weeks.

Resource for Pregnant and Postpartum support:

Postpartum Support International warm line and website:

1-800-944-4773

http://www.postpartum.net/get-help/locations/

Episode Sponsor:

Maternal Mental Health Now Online Training! You can learn more in-depth about perinatal mental health issues like (1) Risk Factors & Prevalence, (2) Symptoms & Diagnoses, (3) Screening & Assessment, (4) Attachment & Bonding, (5) Interventions, (6) Treatment Plans, and (7) Psychopharmalogical Considerations.

This training, given by experts in the field, is helpful to anyone who supports pregnant and postpartum families! Go to www.Maternalmentalhealthnow.org

Mom & Mind can be found wherever you listen to podcasts and at www.momandmind.com

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