CONTRIBUTED
Maternal Mental Health Week 2018:
Most mums struggle with mental health issues
A recent report by Dr Louise Howard of King’s College London
stated that 1 in 4 mums struggle with their mental health during pregnancy.
Another found that more than 1 in 3 mums struggle post-natally. This might seem
high, but in a recent MummyLinks survey 70% said they were currently, or had
suffered with a mental health issue. Almost 30% struggled with depression, 30%
with anxiety, and 15% with other issues such as OCD and PTSD.
So why are these figures so high? And seem to be rising?
One reason is that we are talking about it more. We’ve seen
leaps and bounds in progress regarding talking about mental health recently –
and the celebrities and key figures have been great at helping this cause from
Gwyneth Paltrow, to Stacey Solomon, to Andrea Leadsom. This does make it seem that the
instances are rising. But is it just that people are more open about it? People
didn’t used to talk about cancer after all, and now we wouldn’t dream of hiding
that away.
But is there a bigger issue? Founder of MummyLinks, Emily Tredget believes so.
She says:
“Depite feeling more connected through social media, mums
are more lonely than ever.”
Her MummyLinks survey also asked mums how lonely they felt
and a staggering. Almost half of the mums surveyed had high levels of
loneliness (66 or more out of 100), and all mums said they were lonely some of
the time. Interestingly she found that being part of a service such as NCT
reduced loneliness by 22% - coincidentally, the same percentage that being part
of NCT reduced mental health issues by. Of those not part of NCT 2 in 3 mums
struggled. But for those part of NCT it was just 1 in 2.
“This doesn’t surprise me at all”, says Emily. “I found NCT invaluable
– not only for teaching me about the birth itself, but more importantly for
connecting with mums local to me who were going through the same experience,
all within a month of each other.”
But, Emily believes that 1 in 2 struggling is still too high,
and something needs to be done.
“Yes NCT is invaluable, but for some it’s too expensive, and
even with this the rates of maternal mental health issues is just too high.
Four mums close by is great, but this isn’t enough of a community to help you
through when things get tough, or you just want to get out of the house and
they’re not free.”
Maternal Mental Health week is 30th April – 6th
May and Emily is arranging a campaign called #ShoutieSelfie. It aims to
raise awareness of maternal mental health and fight the stigma. She ran it
first in 2017 having just 2 months of social media experience, and 10 days to
plan it. Despite this is got maternal mental health trending in its first half
an hour and 1 million impressions. This year she is arranging an even bigger
campaign with thousands of supporters – from NCT, to PANDAS, to ready to hit
social media with their “shoutie selfie” to get people talking. Watch closely
and you might even see a celebrity face or two shouting that week!
“#ShoutieSelfie is so important to me. I struggled with PND,
PNA and PTSD after the birth of my son in 2015. Instead of being the best time
of my life it was the worst. I went from being a confident and successful
woman, to being scared to have coffee with a close friend. I was anxious
whenever I was left alone with my son because I didn’t believe I knew how to
look after him. It wasn’t until I started hearing that it wasn’t just me that
was struggling. That others did too, that I realised it wasn’t that I was an
awful person and mother. I was ill, and I could get help. And that’s why I’m
now on a mission to ensure all mums – and dads – currently struggling know they
are not alone and that they can get better.”
The campaign helps to reduce the stigma, but doesn’t do
anything to reduce the loneliness felt on a day to day basis my millions of
mums UK (and world!) wide. So Emily isn’t stopping there. She has been working
tirelessly to create a new app to help mums beat loneliness through safe and
local playdates. MummyLinks is currently a facebook group, but by summer the
app will be out for mums to test.
“When I was struggling with loneliness – which for me lead
to post natal depression – I set up a local whatsapp group of mums I knew, and
they added mums they knew locally. It was great as if somebody cancelled last
minute, or you haven’t arranged a playdate, you could ping a message out to a
large number of local mums at once and usual find someone also keen to meet
–whether you knew them directly, or not. But I realised I was lucky to be in
this situation, and even with 15 or so mums in the group, sometimes nobody was
free. I often wanted an app to do this – I didn’t mind meeting a new mum, I
just wanted a reason to get out of the house and a chat!”
It’s invite only, which for Emily is key.
“Being invite only makes it a bit harder to join, but it’s
key that mums using the service feel safe. It’s something I always felt, and in
chatting to many mums around the UK I’ve found that it’s really important to
most of them too.”
Similar services have been popping up over the last year or
two – most notably Mush and Peanut which both have millions of pounds backing
and are headed up by marketing and tech gurus (Peanut is a collaboration between
Deliveroo and Badoo founders) – but this isn’t deterring Emily.
“I may not have tons of investment, but I truly believe that
the community we are creating is going to be highly beneficial. Not just to
mums struggling with mental health issues – to all mums. And if we can reduce
loneliness, and therefore some cases of mental health issues, then I have
achieved what I set out to do.”
To get involved with the campaign on 30th April search
for #ShoutieSelfie or @MummyLinksApp on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook and follow her lead!
To ask to join MummyLinks head to: www.facebook.com/groups/MummyLinks
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