A Postpartum Planning Tool for Your Client Sessions

A parent who is exhausted, flat and snapping at her children could be experiencing perinatal depression. She could also be experiencing something that is much easier to miss. In this episode, Rebecca looks at two presentations in perinatal mental health that can sit side by side in a session and call for very different support: perinatal depression and parental burnout. She explains why telling them apart matters for the parents you work with, and what perinatal providers can star...

Most conversations about perinatal grief focus on the loss of a pregnancy or a baby. There is another kind of grief running through the transition to parenthood, and parents rarely hear that it is normal. In this episode, Rebecca walks through the ambiguous grief that shows up at every stage of becoming a parent, from conception and pregnancy through birth and the postpartum period. Think of a client who has told you she is happy with her baby and still feels heavy or sad, and conside...

How a new parent looks when they walk into your room tells you very little about how they're coping. Screening is how you find out, and any professional working in the perinatal period can do it. In this episode, Rebecca walks through why a client's appearance is a poor guide to how a new parent is coping, and why the pressure to look put together makes it harder for mothers to say they are struggling. She covers the difference between screening and diagnosis, why handing over a form be...

Perinatal mental health is getting more attention, but general mental health training doesn't prepare you to spot what makes perinatal mood and anxiety disorders different. What gets missed in that gap can be serious. In this episode, Rebecca is joined by perinatal psychotherapist Gaby Beaujeu for the show's first guest conversation, exploring what perinatal mental health actually covers and why specialisation matters. They talk through how far the perinatal window really stretches, from fe...

Almost every parent worries. Perinatal anxiety is something different, and knowing how to tell the two apart changes what you do next. In the first episode of Perinatal in Practice, Rebecca lays out how to distinguish the normal uptick in worry that comes with pregnancy and new parenthood from a perinatal anxiety disorder. She explains why anxiety naturally increases during this period, from an evolutionary and neurological standpoint, and walks through three practical questions professionals...