Perinatal Mental Health

What We Are Trying To Achieve

Perinatal mental health refers to a woman’s mental health during pregnancy and up to 12 months after birth. This includes mental illness existing before pregnancy, as well as illnesses that develop for the first time, or are greatly exacerbated in the perinatal period. Perinatal mental health services offer ‘perinatal specific’ interventions.

The PMH Programme aims to:

• Support improved service provision
• Reduce regional variations in perinatal mental health care
• Improve access and inequalities
• Improve data collection and reporting
• Improve training provision
• Improve user experience
• Supporting the Integrated Care Systems in achieving the following PMH LTP ambitions by 2023/24:
  • Access - Increasing access to specialist community PMH services to 66,000 women
  • 24 Months - Extending community services from preconception to 24 months after birth
  • Therapies - Expanding access to evidence-based psychological therapies within PMH services, including parent-infant, couple, co-parenting and family interventions.
  • Partners - Ensuring partners of women accessing specialist PMH services and MMHS receive evidence-based assessment of their mental health and are signposted to support as required
  • MMHS - Implementing Maternal Mental Health Services, that will integrate maternity, reproductive health and psychological therapy for women experiencing mental health difficulties directly arising from, or related to, the maternity experience.

Why It’s Important

Around one in four women experience mental health problems in pregnancy and during the 12 months after giving birth. If left untreated, mental health issues can have significant negative and long-lasting effects on the woman, the child, and the wider family. Therefore, the collective aim across the region is to fully support women and families to achieve the best outcomes by ensuring need is identified early, the correct support is in place locally and that the support is provided in a timely fashion.

The costs of undiagnosed or untreated PMH problems include avoidable suffering, damage to families, impact on children and death and serious injury (Maternal Mental Health Alliance). Additionally, the economic cost to society of not effectively treating perinatal mental illness far outweighs the cost of providing appropriate services.