It’s Perinatal Mental Health Week. Here’s what it means to me

Trigger Warning: This article discusses pregnancy loss and mental health.

This week is Perinatal Mental Health Week — an event dedicated to increasing awareness around mental health for new and expecting parents and eliminating the stigma for those who seek out help.

It’s also the week my baby would have been born, had I not miscarried early in my first trimester — an event that would ultimately lead me to the counselling services of not-for-profit Gidget Foundation Australia .

I want to start with the acknowledgement that our experience is not unique. In Australia, up to 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage, impacting more than 100,000 couples every year, Miscarriage Australia estimates.

But what is unique to each person who experiences loss is their grief response. I’m not going to say that the world fell out from underneath me completely. But it did tilt sideways for a little bit. And amid the variables that life was choosing to throw, became a period characterised by what I could control.

I sought comfort in work — its predictability, deadlines and order. I rage-organised — there was a lot of rage-doing during this time — a family trip to Melbourne down to the most minute detail (grazing platter, anyone?). It was brilliant fun, and the change of scenery we needed. But there’s a photo from that weekend that still pierces me to look at. What you see? The perfect wedding guest, captured in the midst of an event filled with love and beauty and happiness, exactly as it should be. What I see? A woman in pain doing her very best.

What helped was the wholehearted support my partner and I received from our respective workplaces. From the first moment of our “threatened miscarriage” through to our eventual loss, I was transparent with my manager, team and stakeholders about the uphill journey we were facing. While I never doubted my workplace for a second (please note, I am an employee of LinkedIn), what surprised me more was the encouragement my partner received from a relatively new employer in construction — an industry not historically known for its family-friendly approach.

It's this acute knowledge of the role organisations play in the recovery process of those who experience loss that prompted Samantha Payne, who is the Founder & CEO of non-profit The Pink Elephants Support Network, to use her own personal heartache to push for change, including the government’s legislated Leave for Loss policy.

The LinkedIn Top Voice advocates for supportive workplace policies for those experiencing loss or fertility challenges — such as balancing work while undergoing IVF — and collaborates with firms to ensure employers are building family friendly workplace policies “to provide more understanding from those that haven’t had this experience so they can meet those that do with the empathy and understanding that’s required,” she writes.

When I think about the decision to seek out mental health support, I’m reminded of a recent LinkedIn post by Stephanie Trethewey , the Founder & CEO of Australia’s first online rural mothers group program Motherland . Trethewey is open about her own mental health rollercoaster since becoming a mum. “The additional pressures of life on the land, combined with raising two little ones with no village, has nearly broken me at times,” she writes.

“The biggest lesson I’ve learned? Noone is coming to save you. I’ve invested the time in myself to get better so I can be the happiest Steph I can be despite all life on the land throws.”

While our journeys are different, I see myself in Trethewey’s sentiment. The pregnancy was our North Star, even if just for a little while. The loss of it will sit with us forever. I knew that if I wanted to approach it with my best self, now and in the future, then I needed to invest in equipping myself with the right tools to do so.

1 in 5 new mums and 1 in 10 new dads/non-birthing partners experience perinatal depression and anxiety, which is around 100,000 Australian parents each year.

Following a miscarriage, two in five (43%) of Australian parents felt alone in their grief and two in five (40%) did not want to burden others while navigating their grief, according to a survey by Gidget Foundation Australia.

“Four years ago when we first pulled together the wider perinatal mental health organisations to unite with one voice, there were 26 support organisations who participated,” Arabella Gibson , CEO of Gidget Foundation Australia writes on LinkedIn.

“This year, there are now 56 partners collaborating to support Australians experiencing perinatal mental ill-health.”

This Perinatal Mental Health Week, I would love to say that I’m ‘fixed’ but it doesn’t work like that. Falling pregnant with our rainbow baby some months later added a beautiful and much-wanted complexity to working through our loss.

Stephanie Payne writes about hiding her next pregnancy for as long as possible. “I couldn’t take the excitement and joy that others naturally had for a baby I couldn’t believe in … I still can’t think back to that pregnancy without feeling teary and sad at just how hard I found it,” she writes on LinkedIn. Reading those words still takes my breath away at how deeply they resonate. When I first saw them, I reached out to Payne and told her as much.

As we inch closer to the halfway mark of my pregnancy, I’m committed to finding the light in this journey, while the part of me that knows too much still lingers, tentatively, in the shade.

This is why I will continue to seek out resources and in-person support, as well as conversations on LinkedIn from others with lived experience. It’s why I speak openly about the anxiousness I carry through this pregnancy. It’s why I share with my team when “I’m off to Gidget”. It’s also why, after so long shying away from using my passion as a storyteller, I’m choosing to share my experience now. So that I can help play a small part in eradicating the stigma associated with asking for help.

Support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline Australia on 13 11 14, and Mensline on 1300 789 978.