Helen became a parent 10 years ago. She has a history of mental health problems but following the birth of her first child, she suffered a postnatal psychosis. She was admitted to a local general psychiatric unit and separated from her child.
Helen shares her story and explains how this led her to set up a peer support group that works to support emotional and mental wellbeing during pregnancy and after birth.
There was so much going on and I was screaming the place down. I could hear my baby crying, not just a baby, but I could hear my baby crying even though she wasn’t there. I obviously wasn’t well.
Hear Helen tell her story in the video below...
"So that was my experience 10 years ago. It took me a long time to get over what had happened. I went on to have another baby and I was ok, so time went on and I carried on with my life. I then got pregnant again, we’d planned it, but it was quite a gap – I had my third child in 2019 so there was a 6/7-year gap between my pregnancies.”
Why did you go on to form your own group?
“I started doing this course through the church – called Pioneer Mission – and the idea is that you were looking how you could support your community. So, when I got pregnant again, I was back under the perinatal team again and I remember them saying, ‘We haven’t really got any peer support around here. Not in Southend.’
I didn’t really know what peer support was and I didn’t know how to do it, but I thought maybe this is the right thing to do. I could remember how it felt for me. And we know it’s really common, that mums are much more likely to develop mental health problems, but you don’t want to talk about it, or you think people won’t understand.
I can remember I was in a NCT group, they were really lovely, but I didn’t feel I could talk about my anxieties, or if I did, everyone went really quiet because no one really knew what to say and I really felt isolated.
You feel isolated as a new mum anyway because you’re suddenly in a different environment; you’re not working anymore, you can’t see the same people, you may not be able to get out but then you’re also isolated because you can’t say that you’ve had this experience and you don’t know how to talk about that.
If you are genuinely depressed you might not be leaving your house, you might not be talking, you might not be eating, you might not be looking after yourself. The most common reason that new mums die is suicide. It is the biggest factor. So, if this is true why aren’t we tackling this seriously?
People aren’t educating women that postnatal illness is a common thing to happen and there is still this reticence to open up and talk about it and let people know about the risk. There are all kind of risks involved with having a baby that we talk about quite openly, but this is not. I think it’s slowly getting there though. People are starting to talk about it.
I could see how setting up a group could help but I didn’t really know how to do that, so I did a bit of research and I talked to a couple of ladies locally – the Butterfly Mother in Southend and the lady who runs Lotus Petals in Canvey Island. They explained what they were doing and from that I started a morning at my church in Westcliff where anyone could come and talk about mental health and well being around this time.
We started out in May 2019 so my little one was about 4.5 months old. I started off just showing up and putting on the coffee for anyone who came. It was very variable as it’s not an easy subject to want to talk about and you want to reach a group of people who by nature may not want to come out and talk to people, so it was tricky. It still is really. You don’t know who’s going to come or who wants to come. You get people who maybe come once or twice and then they don’t come again, and you don’t know if that’s because they’re feeling better or they just don’t like the group!
But I keep coming back to my thing – to make a place for people to talk about it. So, if there is one aim it’s to help people feel like they’re not on their own with what they’re going through.
So that went on every week until Covid and then I had a lot of decisions to make on what to do with all the restrictions. We went on to Zoom for a while, but it’s been challenging to reach people. I think the advantages are you don’t have to get baby out in time, which is a big thing for a new mum! You can dip in and out as much as you want to and also geographically, we’ve had people join us from much further out.
Some people say it’s a bit intrusive as you can see into your house – your home, your kids, your husband in the corner or your partner and some people don’t like that. I think it’s tricky. You can’t force people to join a group, even if you know they really need help. They may find it hard to talk about it and it can be hard to join in on a new thing where they don’t really know anyone.
If you’re in a reasonable place it can be ok, but if you really are struggling and are very down you may not want to join a Zoom meeting for the first time with people you’ve never met. If you want to have a look through a door in a church hall you can walk away again if you change your mind but you can’t really do that online so it can be a bit intimidating in that way.
With going to Zoom we’ve had the regular people join and that’s been really good as they all know each other and they’re happy to chat. There are real relationships there. But I am aware that it can be really hard to break into an established group. So, I’m quite looking forward to having real meetings again as I think that might be a better way of bringing people together.”
What’s next for Well?
“I want to formalize what I’m doing, so I plan to form a formal constituted voluntary group going forward. There will be a point where I’m going to need funding to be able to get bigger, i.e. for DBS checks and for personnel and volunteers to help run the group.
I’d like to have more than one group running, at least two because it’s quite a large geographical area to try and cover. And I don’t think anyone is really running the same thing round here.”
Well perinatal peer support is based in Westcliff, Essex.
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