Overview
Mothers are asked to offer the critical early childhood care that shapes people and impacts communities, while systems fail to offer them the basic care they need to thrive.
We invited Dr. Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, health psychologist and IBCLC, to map the real drivers of maternal mental health and the surprisingly simple supports that change everything: responsive care, consistent follow‑through after screening, and communities designed to include mothers instead of isolating them.
We trace the chain from attachment to lifelong outcomes—why secure bonds in the first thousand days predict resilience, school success, and adult health—and why rising ACEs signal a collective failure, not individual weakness. Kathleen challenges outdated hormone‑only narratives and explains how stress systems, trauma history, and cultural fit shape postpartum depression. She shares practical shifts any hospital or community can adopt today: walking groups that blend sunlight and peers, Baby Cafés that normalize feeding and connection, and staff who can spot a painful latch and intervene before a spiral begins. We also dig into sleep: red night lights, keeping baby close, and the counterintuitive finding that exclusive breastfeeding moms often sleep more overall because resettling is faster.
For families and friends asking “how can I help?”, we lay out concrete steps: protect a lying‑in period, offer hands‑on care, screen out unhelpful voices, and create an emergency four‑hour sleep window when she’s hanging by a thread. We look squarely at high‑risk groups, especially military mothers, where depression rates soar—then expand the toolkit with options beyond medication when needed: CBT, acupuncture, omega‑3s, vitamin D. We discuss innovations like rTMS, as well as emerging research on the careful use of ketamine with severe suicidal depression. Cultural trust matters; offering choices increases access and honors lived experience. We close with resources you can use now, from community programs to free postpartum art that normalizes breastfeeding and early parenting.
If this conversation moved you, share it with someone who supports new parents, subscribe for more, and leave a quick review—your words help more families find the care and connection they deserve.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome & Guest Background
2:21 From Trauma Research To Maternal Health
5:10 Beyond Hormones: What Really Drives PPD
8:35 Attachment, ACEs, And Societal Costs
12:55 Practical Support Beyond Breastfeeding
16:10 Systems That Work: Grassroots To Hospitals
20:40 Screening Fails Without Real Follow‑Up
24:10 Reducing Isolation: Groups, Cafés, Community 28:05 Valuing Mothers: Rituals, Rest, Boundaries
32:10 What Partners, Friends, Family Can Do
36:05 Sleep Science, Night Strategies, Red Light
41:45 Breaking Cycles: Fussy Babies And Anxiety
46:30 Breastfeeding, Sleep, And Depression Data
50:20 Treat Anxiety: Tools Beyond Medication
54:30 High‑Risk Groups: Military Mothers
58:05 New Treatments: rTMS, Omega‑3, Vitamin D
1:01:20 Culture, Trust, And Expanding Options
1:04:20 Resources, Art, And Ways To Reach Help 1:07:00 Closing Gratitude & Listener Invitation
Links to Praeclarus Press: https://praeclaruspress.com/
Transcript
Welcome back to the How We Can Heal podcast. Today, we welcome back Dr. Kathleen Kendall Tackett, who is featured on the show in season four. She's a health psychologist and an American international board-certified lactation consultant, specializing in women's health research, including breastfeeding, depression, psychoneuroimmunology, and trauma. Today, we focus on maternal mental health, what it means for children, families, and society at large, and how we can shift systems in simple, practical ways to support the health of mothers and developing children.
Dr. Kendall Tackett has authored more than 490 articles or chapters, and has authored or edited over 40 books. I read and loved her recent book, Breastfeeding Doesn't Need to Suck. And today we get a chance to chat a bit about that, as well as about the fourth edition of Depression in New Mothers, which is now out in two volumes. Dr. Kendall Tackett has won countless awards, is a past president of the American Psychological Association's Division of Trauma Psychology, and is chair of its publications and communications board.
Dr. Kendall Tackett is also editor-in-chief of two peer-reviewed journals, Clinical Actation and Psychological Trauma, and is the owner and editor-in-chief of Proclaris Press, a small press specializing in women's health. I met Dr. Kendall Tackett over a decade ago, and I've been a fan of her work ever since. Her recent publications on maternal health and breastfeeding were timed quite well for me personally. And I hope this episode helps her work reach the people who need it the most right now. I'm so grateful to have her back on the show and to share this conversation with you. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Kathleen Kendall-Tackett to the show.
Dr. Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, welcome back to the How We Can Heal podcast. I'm so thrilled to have you back here. As I've said many times, I can just interview you once a week, and that could be the podcast because you have so much information in that beautiful brain of yours. So thank you for being here.
And thank you for having me back, Lisa. It's always delightful to talk to you.
Yay. I wanted to start by asking you just how you came to specialize in maternal mental health. Oh, it was an interesting journey.
I was trained in developmental psych, but with a real focus on family violence. And that's actually been my area of specialization for a long time. That's where I first started. And it started with working at a rape crisis center when I was in my master's program. And that opened up doors and opened up opportunities for research. And it was a topic I just really connected to. You know, and like back in the early days, I mean this was back in the 80s, and that was back in the days when the whole idea of child sexual abuse was really a new field, and there was just so much stuff going on. And you start feeling like, wow, I could actually contribute something here.
Yes.
And so I was working away at that and then finished up my PhD program and had a baby a month later. And which is not a great way to do it. It really isn't. But I just really felt like I wanted to be finished with school first. So I mean, I was just like flying through. But I had really difficult birth and there was no one to help. Absolutely. I told people, and everybody just they had no idea what to do.
Wow.
I thought, okay, I'm gonna do what I'm trained to do, which is I'm gonna read research. That's what I'm gonna do. Yeah. Because that's that was my training. My PhD is from a tier one research institute. I'm not I'm not a clinician. Uh so I thought I that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna look at the literature. And it was interesting because it was a revelation because all of a sudden I'm reading and I'm thinking, this is very different than what the quote experts were saying. Interesting. We're really emphasizing at the time. This is all due to estrogen and progesterone, and we need to get people on estrogen patches and progesterone suppositories. I mean, this was the emphasis. And I remember even asking, Well, what about family violence? You know, what about sexual assault? And they said, That has nothing to do with it. Interesting. Of course, it's one of the biggest risk factors.
Yeah.
You know, and so as I was looking at this, I got an idea for the first book. I thought, I'm going to actually show what this research actually is. And for the most part, the thing with estrogen and progesterone was largely disproven, mainly because uh almost everybody in the world goes through that same shift. And yet not everybody gets depressed. Right. You know, so how do you explain that? Yeah. It's kind of like obviously social support was a huge modifier of that. Yes, you know, and so it's like if this is strictly a biologically predetermined kind of response, then you know, uh everybody should have it.
Right.
And you don't, it's not even close. And so that was actually a real revelation to me. The people who were the so-called experts, I I thought honestly had it wrong.
Yeah.
With all the confidence that you feel has a new PhD, which you know you do. Um, but yeah, I got a book uh, you know, called How to Write a Book Proposal, and I wrote my first book proposal, like with the book open and like yeah, sent it off. And that was how I started working in this area. And then I kind of went off and I did other things, and I came back, and I've come back a total of five times now. The book is in its fifth edition and is now actually split into two volumes. It changed titles, so it's now called Depression and New Mothers. I just felt that that was more accurate than calling it postpartum depression, because postpartum really actually refers to that first six weeks. And really, it's a misnomer because when you really read the research literature, they're looking at the first year. Yeah, you know, I'll have people say, clinicians say, Well, you know, she can't have postpartum depression because her baby's nine months old. It's like that's rubbish. And actually, one thing I found is like, especially in cases where like a mother say has a baby that's premature or in the dink you for whatever reason, or the neonatal intensive care unit. Oftentimes those mothers get depressed later. It's not usual for them to have a delayed response because everything is focused on keeping that baby alive. The baby that's what the all the worry is going to. And then usually once the baby's out of danger, cross through that, then all of a sudden that's when they start feeling the symptoms.
Right. Because they're having an activation stress response to be there and do things and make choices and move forward. And then once there's some level of safety, then yeah.
Yep, that's exactly it. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. They feel safe. They feel safe to do it so that now that suddenly they can collapse.
Yeah.
And yeah. So, you know, it's like you you started seeing stuff that really contradicted. So interesting. Yeah. You know, because some hormones are important in this. Stress hormones are important, oxytocin is important, but the drop in estrogen and progesterone, no, largely not. You know, there's a couple of studies that have shown that for some susceptible women, maybe. But see, it led us down a whole line of like interventions that were really not very helpful.
And sometimes that happens. We find something that's working for someone or a subset, and then we apply it in a large way, and then that's when we learn, oops, nope, that doesn't work for everyone.
Honestly, based on things we were talking about earlier, one of the things that happened is the models of care really got set up for white middle class women. You know, the white middle class women are the ones who actually will go to a psychiatrist and wean the babies, take a bunch of medications, because it was a pile of medications at the time.
Yeah.
And they'll do this. And it's like there's a lot of communities absolutely who will not ever darken the door of a psychiatrist alone take all those drugs. They just won't do it.
Yeah.
So you can have a whole bunch of people that are being left out.
Right. So culturally, it's kind of self-selecting.
Very much. Very much. The good news is there's just so many other treatments that you can use.
So let's back up a little bit. Why does maternal mental health matter at a societal level? It's so common for us to just get nitty-gritty and like which hormone and which pill. And I want to get right back there. But I think there's this broader interconnection of mothers in the world and mothers in society, and and just with all your depth and experience, why do you feel that maternal mental health matters to all of us as a global?
I absolutely feel like it matters. Because it really kind of comes down to it's something that really influences the security of that mother-infant attachment. Yes. You know, and it's like we are as a society are treating our children worse and worse. When the original adverse child experiences study came out, they found about 50% reported one or more adverse childhood experiences. The most recent CDC survey, 64%. Wow. We're not going in the right direction. We're going in the wrong direction. And I think part of it is because we treat our mothers so poorly and they disconnect from their babies. They go off in a different way. And so at a societal level, we pay the price for that. You know, and if we were to invest in helping establishing that secure attachment, that creates resilience and that could head off so many problems. It predicts things like success in school. If you don't think that that's important, I mean, that is super important. Yeah. Success in school, success in relationships, having a secure attachment a lot of times predicts your adult health. I mean, so all these things we're going to either pay for it now or going to pay for it later. And we're going to pay a lot more for it. So on a kind of like a broad sort of macro level, we should look at our child data and be very, very worried because we're doing something wrong. And what I'd like to see people do is do something right. Let's head in the right direction. Let's invest the money now and the effort now so that we can actually improve the health. Because it's not just like when I work with breastfeeding mothers, I tell the providers a lot of times, you're not just showing a mother how to feed a baby. This is actually also helping her establish that pattern of responsive parenting that leads to secure attachment. But that's important even for mothers who aren't breastfeeding. So it's kind of like, okay, if breastfeeding didn't work or wasn't chosen for whatever reason, we still got to end up end up showing and modeling that responsive care because that's going to make a difference in terms of that security of an attachment. You know, it's like, okay, so if that didn't work out, okay, we should be talking about baby wearing. We should be talking about infant massage, we should be talking about paste bottle fee. These are all things that we know that establish attachment because of responsive care. And that's really the crux of it. And then it was like I said, if we don't pay for it now, we're going to pay for it later.
Right. And so you're talking about prevention, right? You're talking about being aware of how the connection between a child and their mother impacts their development, impacts their choices in life, their position in life. And you're talking about even from a sort of political standpoint, well, are we investing in young people and mothers and parents, or are we investing in fixing problems later, which is more expensive? Right. And I think it's hard to get that aggregate data and really like put a graph in front of someone, but it makes so much logical sense.
To me, a metric of that is the adverse childhood experiences data. But I think we can look at it in terms of okay, let's look at our health problems. Yeah. Let's look at the rates of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and all of these things kind of related. Yeah. Let's look at the huge mental health crisis we have. Yeah. Let's look at how many people who have been in combat who have come home and killed themselves. Right. You know, and it's kind of like oftentimes when you really look at those combat veterans' histories, what you actually find is oftentimes they have a history of adverse child experiences before they come into the military. Right. That creates a vulnerability then to combat stress. Now, combat stress, of course, all by itself can cause problems. Oh yeah. But are there any protections or are they coming in more vulnerable? And we especially find this for our female soldiers. They even have higher rates than the general population of intimate partner violence, adverse health experiences. And then they get into that military culture, and then they're very susceptible to harassment and even sexual assault. Yeah. Really high rates. It's called military sexual trauma. It's huge. And so again, like I said, I think actually we're just not looking at this and tracing it back. There are people who are. And they talk about the first thousand days and all that stuff and how important that is. I absolutely agree. I 100% agree. But I think it's going to be investing in some pretty big changes.
Yeah.
I would say it would even start with, say, for example, providing competent lactation care. I just honestly don't think a lot of our major health institutions have the will to do it. It starts with not having enough staff. Yeah. That's it's it really comes down to that. And also, what happens when your staff gets really burned out? And are you checking for that? Are you checking for the mental health of your staff? So there's just all kinds of systemic things that we have to address. But yeah, I think we can point to a dozen different metrics to say, no, look, we're in trouble.
Yeah, absolutely. So, what other systemic actions have you seen that support maternal mental health? You mentioned lactation education, which along with that, supporting people who are providing that, you know, making sure those systems are healthy in terms of burnout and stress and adequate numbers of staff.
That's kind of a key thing.
Yeah, and that all makes so much sense. What else have you seen that really powerfully supports mothers and maternal mental health from a systemic standpoint?
I will use Pittsburgh as an example. Okay. I think that they have an amazing system there. And it's all down to a few providers who got together and decided to do something. And so they have the most incredible network of maternal support systems and groups and classes and things that they can go to and just ways to connect. And unfortunately, it doesn't probably catch everybody. Yeah. But it can catch a lot of people. And I think it really does. And just kind of again thinking on like a smaller level. It's like a lot of times when I go out and lecture, you know, I'm at hospitals. Yeah. And then I'll run into somebody from that hospital later and they'll say, Since you came, we started doing something where we get the mothers together, we get them outside, they're all taking omega-3s, and we go take a walk. And they said they found their depression rates going through the floor. Nice. So it doesn't take a lot to make a difference. If you wait for these big organizations to catch on, you're going to be waiting a long time. I really think actually we need to start at the grassroots level, and I think it's going to flow up. Okay. That I think it's going to be consumer demand. I think that's been the case all along. Because I've had people say, Well, what can we do to get the doctors on board? I think unfortunately, with exceptions, of course, but I think oftentimes they're the last of the party. I was looking at the most recent ACOM, which is American College of Obsetrix and Gynecology. I was looking at their post-prime depression guidelines. And they're not great. They're kind of like, well, you can screen if you want. You know, it's like they're very vague. I just can't even imagine that, you know, somebody is gonna that's somebody's gonna benefit from that. Yeah. And somebody's gonna actually do it because there's no instruction.
They have to actually do it. I remember getting a screening, you know, just a paper checkbox screening. And there was one of them that I was like, well, technically, yeah, on that one, I kind of have a story to go with it, but I'm gonna check it because I want to talk to the provider about it. Like I was actually like feeling okay overall, but I checked the box, nothing said anything. And I was like, you know, this box is pretty broad. I can't remember what the topic was, but it was like for you to not respond to that or ask me what I mean by that or what's going on is a big miss.
I think so too. I 100% agree because I, you know, I can't believe the number of people, and in fact, the second volume of my book, I actually really come down on this heart because it's all about screening, assessment, and treatment.
Yeah.
And so I go into kind of details about okay, what are the barriers to screening? Why aren't people screening? But also this idea that just giving somebody a packet of information that includes an Ed and Burrow postnatal depression scale is not an intervention. No, it's really not. Most of the time they don't even do anything about it. Yeah. Then why do it? You're just creating an expectation that there's going to be some help and there isn't.
Or even normalizing. I mean, I was like, I'm glad I'm me and I'm surrounded by mental health professionals. And if there is anything I'm concerned about, I feel like I'm fully supported and I have a thousand places to reach out. But it's like, what if somebody else had checked that box? And what if they were in like a really severe, like they had some shame around it, but were scared and decided to check it because it was so bad, right? Like the scenario could have been very different. And I feel like I've worked with a lot of people that would fit that bill really want to say, but maybe I really need help. So okay, I'll check one box, right? And then nothing. Nothing. And then and then the message that could send, which is, oh, it's not a big deal, or you're not important, or this isn't important, or you should just suck it up, or whatever, right? People are gonna make their own sense of it, but not responding, we fill in the blanks.
Well, our people that you know they feel like they've done their due diligence in this, and it's like, no, you haven't even scratched the surface of it. Yeah, and this is actually one thing I found is you know, these quote educational kind of little handouts do zip if you just do them by yourself. I mean, they have no effect at all. Even if you have somebody say, here's a handout, we're gonna talk about it for a few minutes before you're discharged. Yeah, no, doesn't have any effect. Now, can that be useful in the context of a bigger program? Yes. Okay. But there's lots and lots of things that can be done at community levels that just aren't. We still release mothers on their own and they just are there to flounder around about six weeks. One thing that Jack Newman, he's a kind of a famous pediatrician up in Canada, and he's also a lactation consultant, but he's actually said, you know, if we had every single person who saw mothers and babies know how to assess the latch and to know what should be pain-free, and to actually know that that baby is actually getting milk, drinking milk from the breast.
Yeah.
If we could do those, if everybody could do those two things, he said, we would prevent so many tragedies. But again, that's just an example of where people a lot of times are missed. You know, nobody mothers are sent home and then they're sent home and they're in pain and they're thinking, oh, I can't tell anybody this because I quote should know how to do this. Right. Even people I know who are really pretty educated and who I've actually given my home phone number to and said, call me, please call me. First sign of trouble. I want you to call me. And then I find out six weeks later that no, they actually have been in just an agony and they can't stand it anymore. I'm like, why didn't you call me? Yeah, yeah, called me six weeks ago. It's like, you know, so there's just we leave mothers just struggling with this stuff, just struggling and struggling, struggling. One of the things I talk about in my book, Breastfeeding Doesn't Need to Suck, is uh love that book so much. And that title is just I can't take credit for that. My editor came up with that, but um, I talk about what we call the five eyes of motherhood, and I think this affects everybody, this idea of idleness and isolation and intensity, and it's like your brain plays a lot of tricks on you during that time. If you spent a lot of alone time in that postpartum period and you're like very isolated, and I think we've had a big experiment with what happens when we isolate people. Yes, it's called the COVID lockdowns. Yes, you know, and if you're isolated and you're struggling in your body, I mean your mind can play all kinds of tricks. Oh, yeah, and can be telling you, oh, I'm my life is never gonna be the same. I don't know how to do this, this is too much. I've made the hugest mistake of my life. That's not conducive to good mental health. No, and considering prisoners are isolated as punishment and considered cruel and usual punishment, right? Why would we expect new mothers are gonna do better with that?
Right. Yeah. So how do you feel like communities can support maternal mental health? I'm thinking of this mom alone in their house feeling all these thoughts, and and they've left the hospital and they're not maybe in a program anymore. So they're they're just out there and they are isolated. Exactly. So if you're you mentioned you spent a lot of time training at hospitals, I'm thinking about hospitals, I'm thinking about any community programs. How can they provide something or do outreach to try to mitigate that isolation and all those all the eyes that you just described?
I think some of the ways is to be able to talk about it and even maybe even have some virtual groups or example for mothers who just can't quite get themselves together to get out the house, which you know that happens. You know, you just sometimes just feel really overwhelmed. But maybe you can click on a link, right? Or maybe there's some videos, you know, to just at least normalize it and say, hey, look, many mothers experience this. It does not mean that you're not a mother because people say, Well, I don't have mothering instincts. What does that make me? Normal. A person, a person with a baby, you know, because unfortunately, a lot of the things that our instincts get suppressed by a lot of the things that we do in hospitals.
Interesting.
And so, and it doesn't necessarily mean you can't learn them. It really is part instinct part learned. And if you don't see it everywhere, you don't get that body memory of it, you know, so you know that body knowledge of it by just observing it all the time. You know, so that I think is a big part of it. So I would say these community groups, these grow up in programs, I love baby cafes.
Yes.
And they're actually starting to do a whole thing with mental health, they're doing outreach with that. I've been training Wiktor counselors for years, yeah, to kind of be aware because who are they gonna talk to? Right. Who are these mothers? They're not gonna can you see a lot of these moms going and knocking on the door of a psychiatrist? Not gonna happen.
Absolutely not, especially amidst all of those potential emotions and feelings. It's not necessarily the place of, oh, I really feel empowered to reach out right now and I have time to make a phone call and an appointment, right? Like from that place.
So you know, the Office of Women's Health actually did launch a really good program called Talk PPD. Okay, and it really was very good because they reached out to all these different community groups and organizations. So they reached out to the lactation consultants and the childbirth educators and the all these different doulas. These are all kind of natural connections, you know. But even again, doing something like that hospital, like getting the moms back together and don't call it a depression group. Nobody wants to go to that. I find so many people that say, Oh, yeah, I used to run with nobody'd come. Say, you know, coping with these huge changes, you know, call it something like that, something attractive that people, well, yeah, I am support group, right? I am coping with some huge changes, you know, and and and maybe do a little bit of education around it and then have some conversation. And oh my gosh, you've been experiencing this too. And again, sometimes groups can be not very helpful just because they can get competitive. So I think it's important that leadership kind of keeps an eye on that and keeps things and know this is not kind of okay to act and talk because it gets to be a race whose baby's sweeping through the knife. It's so nuts because none of that matters, none of it. Right in the end, nobody cares. Yeah. When you oh, you have to hover you. We've got this whole generation of others now feel like I gotta hover over everything, you know. And it's just like, oh my gosh, you're making me exhausted just listening to you.
But I feel like some of that comes from the fact that I mean, we're starting talking about the macro level of like how can systems, how can communities support others? And I feel like because that support isn't integrated and strong, that leads to the isolation, that leads to feeling like I have to do everything. I have to absolutely on, I'm the only one, like all those types of things.
You know, I think that honestly is a real problem. I think it's very patchy. Yeah, I see that with mental health support, I see it with reducing child abuse, and I also see it with lactation support. Those three things, if you can give mothers good support, all three of those things get better.
Right. And you're and we're focusing on what can hospitals do, what community programs who are already working with pregnant and postpartum women. But then I'm thinking about you mentioned baby cafes, and I'm thinking about early on when I had to maybe like pick up dry cleaning and drop off UPS returns and wanted to coffee. And it was like, oh, the baby fell asleep. I'm not doing it. Right. These things in the world that just go on and aren't thinking about parents that just have a young kid with them, and and you don't notice it until you have a young kid, and that's your primary responsibility. You're like, well, I can't do these things, or I can't be at this event, or I can't. In one case, there was a race I wanted to run and we didn't have child care. It's like, I can't run that race, like I can't run it with my child. And some of that is just practical and just is how is what it is, and you deal with it. But there's some things where I think we're just not thinking about it enough on a communal systemic level. Oh, I agree. How do you make it so mothers can bring their babies places?
Yeah.
And yet still kind of meeting the needs of other people, like for example, at church. You know, can you have a crying room so mothers don't have to leave their babies if they don't want to, but they can still participate and listen, right? But then everybody else doesn't have to hear all the baby noises, which sometimes can be distracting.
Right. Or like we we go to the library and there's a silent section over here, a m section in the middle, and the kids section on the other side. And kids are not quiet, and that's okay because it's practically a separate, it's a separate side of the building, and there's kind of a little transition in the middle there. So they work that out. And so everyone's welcome.
Those kinds of things again, like libraries, that's a great resource. Yeah, and they have programs. So sometimes, like an individual community, it takes sometimes just one person or a group of people looking around and saying, you know what? We need to do better with this. And they start liaison with the other groups in town. Okay, who are some other people? How can we do some outreach? How can we make this coffee place baby friendly? Yeah. Is it okay for a mom to sit in here and nurse? Yes. That's a kind of a huge one because that can keep people pretty isolated. They may feel uncomfortable with that. But again, it really comes to normalizing having mothers and babies out in society where they belong.
Yeah, I'm thinking about a cafe nearby that has like a little back toy section that's so I've actually nursed my child there because it's facing in a way that's a little more private. There's blocks and stuff. The time that I was nursing in there, there was no one else in there. So I felt totally fine. And then I think about my friend who's a lactation consultant. In her home, she has huge photographs and paintings of women breastfeeding. And I feel so grateful that I was exposed to that. I mean, I think I've thought about those paintings as I've been breastfeeding and thinking, like, oh, I'm so glad I saw that. I'm so glad that was integrated into my daily life and awareness. And can you imagine in a cafe having a kid area, having a picture of a woman breastfeeding? You don't even have to have like, here's the section, or you know, having a drawing of a mom with a baby.
Well, here's where kind of it gets to be like it's in the culture. So you put us in the culture. And again, just even having places where moms could bring babies or talking to moms about saying, okay, now with your baby, it may be hard for you to get out, but here's some places with drive-throughs. Yes. Here's some places where you can actually get stuff delivered. Actually, in some ways, it's so much better that way than it was when my kids were little. Um, I envy that. Yeah, you can actually pull up and have somebody put groceries in your car. Yes. So I think the more that we can do with that, but again, some of it is just can we pull groups together and have a conversation and figure out how to kind of okay, you know, with this mom, what kind of services can we help her plug into? And so again, it doesn't necessarily even take a lot of money to do something like that. Because people say, Oh, we don't get any money for this. And it's like, well, is it that much harder to like connect, start connecting these different organizations and saying, hey, look, we got this, or hey, listen, we've got this group for new moms and go, you know, leave some handouts, you know, at the local doctor's office. And a lot of times they're happy to pass those out because they think, oh, how do I I can't handle this, but I know somebody who can. Yeah. So again, it's really about how can you think differently and trying not to feel so stuck with the idea that your culture can't change. You can't change a small part of it. And I really think that those kinds of programs are the ones that really make a difference. And it's really lasting. And that's such an impressionable period that actually I think help that you give, people remember that forever.
Yeah, and to your point, it's not just the mother who's receiving that support, the child is benefiting directly from the society benefiting.
The whole family is benefiting term. Yeah. Because unfortunately, mental health has an impact on relationships, it has a real impact on friendships. So it cuts it oftentimes, it cuts mothers off from their normal sources of support. But if we could come along and say to the say the partner, hey, you know, if you can go to doctor's appointments with them or help them find this. If they need help, you're the person to go find this help. Don't put this all on the mother. Here's some really Really constructive ways you can help in this situation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So how can friends and direct family support maternal mental health? What are tangible things you've seen people do that have been preventative or been healing for someone struggling postpartum?
I think probably one of the biggest things is to actually just treat her like a queen. Don't expect her to come back and just jump into normal life. She needs a few weeks to just do nothing but care for the baby, care for herself, make sure she has clean clothes and clean sheets on the bed and whatever support she needs. If she needs a warm drink, if she needs somebody, if she needs company, if she needs a stack of DVDs from the library to watch, but whatever she wants, make her and really reinforce the importance of what she's doing.
Yeah.
The fact is, any interaction that mom and that baby are having that laying down those neural pathways, and that's what they talk about that first thousand days was three years. You're talking about three years. It's like that baby's brain is so malleable. So every interaction, so how can you support that? Make the mother happy, make her feel like she is a queen. Do things like, okay, would you like a hot pack for your shoulders? That releases oxytocin, you know. How can you actually make sure that the area around her is orderly? Yeah, she's not sitting there fretting about it. I hear stories about mothers that one actually was a high-up person in the government and she came home from after a C-section and is throwing in laundry in the into the water. That's ridiculous. Yeah, no. You know, if she had a hernia surgery, they wouldn't let her do that. Right. So why is this different? You know, and it's like I really think that one of the things that really does make a difference is doing things like having clean clothes every day, having the opportunity to go take a shower. And you know, if you start getting into that, my baby needs me. Okay, here's the thing feed your baby, and then pass your baby to a trusted adult, and you go take a shower. You can do that. Yeah, yeah. That person can actually be there to maybe give mom a break. Yeah. I wouldn't recommend necessarily that they step in with feedings because uh that can actually really lead to premature breastfeeding cessation, which sometimes can make the mothers more depressed. Okay, so that sometimes is something that people think that helps, but I would probably keep that as an emergency. Now, if the mother's made the decision that she doesn't want to fully breastfeed, then that is a different story. But if her goal is to breastfeed, then we don't want to do that, but let's support her in every other way we can. And actually, one just little pro tip too, with like nighttime feedings, get some red um night lights on because those don't wake up your brain. Yes, those actually go to the rods in your retina, not the cones. The cones are your daytime vision, the rods are your nighttime vision. And what they used to do is train pilots uh for night missions with red light. They'd be in a room with red light so you can still see, but it's not waking up your brain. So if you are up in the middle of the night and you're nursing your baby, then you don't you're not completely waking up. And that's really gonna help. And also, too, I would say let's make sure that that baby is nearby. Because this idea of gonna oh have somebody else handle nighttime feedings, that works great until they both go to sleep. And it's mothers who wake up first. Right. But I think like in our survey, we found that 80% did not have anybody who could actually help with that. Yeah, so that's suggestion. Not terribly practical in most cases. Now, under certain emergency situations, if you go to a mom that's really, really tired, exhausted, she's hanging on by a thread, you can do that as an emergency strategy.
Yeah.
And you want to aim for like about a four-hour stretch.
Okay.
Okay, so what I suggest is that you start that four-hour stretch at say eight o'clock, eight to midnight. That way the person who is your you know, caregiver can actually still get enough sleep to go to work.
Yeah.
They need to. Because again, like I said, trying to think about practical, what can you practically do? But I would say pamper just it doesn't mean expensive spa days. It doesn't mean anything like that. It means like show her you care, tell her what what a fantastic job, how proud you are of her. Make sure she's comfortable, make sure she has things that she needs, and that she's not sitting there having to worry about getting some groceries in with a newborn. I every time I go to the grocery store and I see that I just want to weep. Yeah. I'm like, where are the people that are supposed to be helping you? Yeah. It breaks my heart. Yeah, sometimes you need to do that just to get out of the house. Now I get that. Right. But a lot of times it's not that, it's like they don't have anybody else. Yeah. You know, but one of the things that we learned in COVID, a very interesting paper that we published in Psych Drama, and it was was talking about people's ideas about time and how that got distorted during the lockdowns. Yeah. You didn't have the normal markers going to work and your weekends, there wasn't a difference between your weekdays and your weekends, everything kind of ran together. Well, I thought, yeah, does that sound like another group we know? That does a lot. So again, having those markers, like, and I think one of the markers is okay, you get up and you put on something clean. Yeah. I don't care if it's a t-shirt and yoga pants, something clean. Yeah. Make sure that you actually are taking care of yourself every day.
And so that leads me to my next question. How can moms themselves make choices to support their health and well-being? And I'm I'm noticing as we're thinking about this, there's so much, you know, you and I are both in the mental health space where there's postpartum depression is a big issue for moms. There's also just, I always think the word mental health, it doesn't actually mean mental illness, even though we kind of treat it like it does, right? Like we're talking about being healthy. So whether or not a mom is experiencing postpartum depression, what can that mom do for themselves to invest in their health, to boost their health? You just mentioned a really practical example. Put on some clean clothes, right? It might seem like, oh, I don't need to, I'm just gonna be home all day, right? My hair, but there's something it's gonna do for you that's actually gonna be helpful. It's a small enough thing, it doesn't take so much time. Hopefully, physically, you can get in and out of your clothes on your own.
Well, and it marks day and night for you, you know, so it's not all running together into a thing, you know. And I mean, I think that that kind of stuff is important. I would say try to get outside every day. Even if you're just walking out to your backyard or down to the mailbox or something, just try to do that because it's sometimes that breaks that. Try not to have really long periods of silence. I think that's when your mind starts eating at you. This is the way your life is gonna be forever. It's never gonna get better.
It's always gonna be like, I mean, that's how I feel right now when Isabella has the wonky donkey on repeat. Shout out to Craig Smith who wrote The Wonky Donkey. It's a very amazing book and song, but she will put it on repeat. It was my most played on my iTunes thousands of times. And there are moments where it'll be on repeat, and I'm like, I'm gonna go insane if I don't stop this song. And I literally will just take her out on the porch and start naming all of the flowers or you know, oh, look at the lemons and look at the leaves and look at okay, headphones. Right? Yeah, I mean, uh, we don't give her headphones yet, but oh man, like tempting, tempting. So tempting. So I think there's something really to that about just breaking up monotony, whether it's silence or it's a certain song on repeat or it's being inside all day. I think it's just breaking that isolation in a way. Yeah. Remembering that you are connected to a larger group. Yes, you're connected to this tiny human who is dependent on you and is amazing and challenging and bundled up into all this wonderfulness, and that's yours most of the time, depending on your care situation, but breaking that up, noticing the changes of day, because sometimes a day can just start and bleed into night and you don't even know who or what or where. So the red light at night, the changing of clothes, the stepping outside, all of those things. And I love that being treated like a queen, that to me communicates value, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
What you're doing is so important. And I think that's a piece that's missing on a lot of these layers. Like we started broad and we're going more narrow. We started more collective, going more individual, but on all these levels, just really valuing like this is so important.
Well, one paper that came up really kind of changed the picture completely for me. It was an anthropology paper, and they were talking about what they call social structures that protected new mother's health.
Oh.
And they said across all these different cultures, that of course they varied, and not all postpartum rituals were actually helpful. Some of them were pretty piad, you know, like trying to determine if the baby is legitimate or not. By, you know, I mean, yeah, some of the stuff is actually pretty, pretty rough. So you want stuff that's obviously supporting the mother, but one of it was the recognizing that this is a unique time.
Yeah.
We don't do that. I think it started because it's like we went into the hospital for that, and a lot of times we were there for a long time back in the day. That wasn't necessarily always a good thing, but I think that's when the quote lying in period disappeared.
Okay.
And so then all of a sudden we get in shorter and shorter and shorter, shorter hospital stays. And some people have argued, yeah, there's some benefit for that, but the problem is mother comes back and she's bam, right back in her life. There's no marking of it.
Yeah.
And yet for the mother, this has been this cataclysmic change. Every aspect of her life has changed. And everybody's like, Yeah, you had a baby, you know, I've I've had five, you know, it's like okay, good. I see to help your empathy. Right. Yeah. But it's this gigantic change. And so, like that recognition, and also too, that there's like a isolation from unhelpful people. That's something that again, a partner can be really helpful. Screening, screening laws, screening people, like say mother or mother-in-law is being very unhelpful, kind of hovering over her shoulder, saying, Is that baby eating again? Didn't he just eat? You know, they think they're helping, they're not. That's not helpful. So, again, being like mindful. Again, so part of it is that she has the right to not have unhelpful people around, and that includes family, and that's a little tricky. So, that could be something that maybe like a post-partum dual or the partner can help with, yeah, but just really having that in the mind that that's an okay thing, you know. And then they did this um ceremony, you know. I I actually have the story from like Uganda, this tribe would do this stepping out ceremony after and they're treated like warriors returning from battle. That's amazing. Can you imagine us doing something like that? So, again, that could be something like on a community level, it could be done. Like, for example, hospitals might have a stepping out ceremony. They might have something that said, Hey, you did a great job. I think all of these things are really important. Giving mothers a little certificate that said, Hey, you did it. It seems like a small trivial thing, but it does actually become very meaningful on that context because what it does is it recognizes, it recognizes her, you know. So it's like if you have these social structures in place, your perinatal mental illness rates go way down. I would also recommend kind of on a physiological level that mothers take omega-3s and they they check their vitamin D. Yeah. Make sure that that's so because so many of our mothers are deficient, and that really can actually increase her risk of depression.
Yeah.
You know, and so I would take a look at those things. Those are some simple things that that mothers can do and they can do on this on themselves, you know. Very straightforward. Trying to get some exercise, I think, is a good thing. Exercise has gone head to head with Zoloft in randomized clinical trials. It's as effective as antidepressants.
Yeah.
But it is sometimes hard. You know, if you're depressed, it's hard to do that. But sometimes just taking simple steps, like, okay, I'm gonna walk outside to my mailbox today.
Exactly.
You know, I'm gonna use a baby sling, which I think is one of the most useful inventions. That's probably the only piece of baby gear I totally recommend. Yeah. One of those is it's like because you know, there's I mean, there's so many people who want to sell you crap. Yeah, it's like a lot of it is not particularly helpful. And we've made mothers so nervous about everything. Right. Somebody told me, and actually I've started hearing this, that now the big thing going around TikTok is mothers are worried about the elasticity of their nipples. Oh, really? Interesting. And it's kind of like nipples are elastic, they're supposed to be because I mean, you know, and so they're worried about everything, and they're worried if they don't do everything right, that the baby's not going to develop. I a lot of times joke when I got out of school, I said, you know, my PhD wasn't very helpful being a new mother, and in a lot of ways it wasn't. I mean, it didn't tell me how to cope with what was happening in my life, but what it did do is it gave me absolute confidence that babies develop. Yes, and so a lot of the advice and the stuff that people were telling me I had to do, I knew I didn't have to because I knew that they unless you put rock them in a closet, they're gonna learn to speak. Yeah, they're gonna learn. I mean, there's it's just it's wired into them, you know, and you don't have to hover over them to so they learn to use scissors. They usually figure it out, especially when they're a little bit older, they figure it out really quick, you know. Yeah, you know, so letting moms a little bit off the hook on this, you know. What they just need is you to be there and to be responsive and have interactions with them. And you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to be perfect looking, you don't have to actually have everything but your hair and nails, try to see if something that's a little more simple regimen, so you still feel good. But um, they just want you, you know. Yeah, your baby to your baby, you are the best person in the whole world. They know you above everybody else, and this whole idea of when mothers get this idea, my baby doesn't like me. Because sometimes babies like resist when you try to put them to breast. But if they've learned that it's a frustrating experience, sometimes that happens. Right. Or if like in the hospital, god forbid, I've heard this too from mothers, you know, somebody's pushing the baby's head. Yeah, yeah. Babies do not like that, they actually have a reflex that if you push on the back of their head, they go back.
Yeah.
So you tell first of all, you don't want to do that, but if you have this attitude that it's the same as bottle feeding, it isn't. Relationship, you relax, you try to, you know, be cool, but we've got it all up in our heads.
Yeah.
So we just make mothers so so crazy with all the stuff we tell them I have to do.
There are so many things that I've been given or got that I'm like, I don't, I don't need this. There's so many times I just end up sort of DIYing it, doing it my own way. Well, yeah. Yeah.
And honestly, this whole thing with the lactation cookies. And at first I thought, okay, well, I guess those are harmless. Well, then I'm hearing about mothers taking money out of other parts of their budget to pay the $80 a month for these cookies because they have to have them. No, no, no, you don't. First of all, no evidence that they actually help. But if you want those, there's lots of recipes online. Yeah. You know, have somebody whip up a little batch. If you want a couple of cookies, go for it. Yeah. You're nursing a baby. They're not magic, though. Yeah. You know, so it's just we put a lot of pressure on mums and we isolate them. So again, I think probably where we really need to start is actually pulling in different community groups, getting them talking about mental health. I mean, happy to see that starting to happen.
Yes. Yeah. And some of the things you've described, I'm like, I've seen some of that.
It's taken a while, but people have said, you know, there are some things we actually can do. And I said, I love the hospital example when they tell me that. And I've heard several hospital people have told me that from different hospitals. Something so simple. They're walking, they're getting sunshine and light, they're getting exercise, and they're getting social support. Yes. And they might not talk about really anything, it's just sometimes being in company and kind of like, okay, yeah, this is fun. Yeah. You know, I remember one time when I was the coordinator of leaders for Lola Julie of Maine in New Hampshire. So we'd had a lot of snow that year, but I had a mama who was like upstate Maine, like near back four, which is way the heck up there. Anyway, we had down or us like over a hundred snow that year. So they would have had even more.
Yeah.
And she's home with two little kids and she was losing her mind. I bet she generally, I do not say that in any kind of funny way. She was losing her mind. Yeah. And she could call me and she would just be beside herself. And I was just like, Listen, you have got to get out of that house. Yeah. Promise me that you'll put your kids in their snowsuit and drive to McDonald's. Go through the drive-thru. But you need to get out of the house for a little bit. I said, You're going a little crazy here.
Yeah.
And so she finally did. But she, you know, she had a baby and was very fussy and wouldn't take a bottle. And so she didn't feel like she could go any place. And I said, Okay, just go in your car. Just break this cycle, this monotony that's in your house. Because I mean, it was bad. And unfortunately, that snow is not helping.
Yeah. That isolation, right? It's adding to that. Absolutely. It really, it really eats at you. I'm laughing because I can hear my daughter in the other room. She's crying. Like thinking of maternal health, right? It's disability. My mom's hanging out with her.
But yeah, no, maternal mental health, it just has such a huge impact on the culture in general. It really envelops everything. And so people are like, Well, I don't see why this is a big deal. It is a big deal. It's a very big deal.
Yeah. And I think when you understand attachment, so much of that becomes obvious, right? It's kind of impossible not to see. But I don't think, you know, not everyone in the world and not even everyone in the therapy world really is focused on learning attachment or applying it. So thank you for drawing all of those connections and exploring each of these layers. I know you just redid this is a fourth edition of your book.
And they're calling it the fourth. It's technically the fifth. It's because I changed the title. So yeah.
Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, right. So, what's something you've learned recently that changed the way you're thinking about maternal mental health?
You know what's interesting because I've been working on something where I'm looking at that link between no sleep and breastfeeding and depression. And what's interesting is I had to do a talk for the UNICEF group in Britain, and uh they wanted me to do something about is it ever too late for brain development? Interesting. Yeah, it was actually really interesting. So I found myself digging into the intergenerational trauma literature, and I was also kind of looking at how does this stuff get passed?
Yeah.
And I really was trying to get down to a nitty-gritty of it, you know, and one of the ways is what happens during pregnancy to those babies.
Yeah.
So if mothers are depressed or have anxiety or PTSD, you know, their babies tend to actually be very poor sleepers when they're born. And crying fussy babies is one of the things that we know that causes depression. So this reinforcing cycle. And so you can see how this would get passed down through the generation. So a baby who is raised by a depressed mom is more likely to be in depressed adult.
Yeah.
Okay. And then they start the cycle again. They have a baby.
Yeah.
I mean, so it's like you can see how this gets passed down. People say, Oh, it's genetic. Well, I think there can be some genetic changes. You know, this is the whole field of epigenetics.
Yeah.
But I think it's also really very specifically environmental.
Yeah.
So part of it and part of the way to intervene in that cycle is to say, okay, how can we help with that baby fussiness and the mother's perceptions of it? Because that seems to be key. I was actually looking at a study about that, and it was looking at anxiety and mother's perceptions about her baby, and then whether she's more likely to continue exclusive breastfeeding. Because if a mother thinks a baby's a poor sleeper, she's more likely to stop breastfeeding.
Interesting.
Yeah. And even though objectively the baby may be not a poor sleeper, but their belief about it. And again, it comes down to this idea. Mothers have sometimes these ideas about what babies should do. And they should be crossing all these milestones. And you know, a lot of the stuff is just fiction. Yeah. It's like the dirty little secret is that there's a lot of babies that don't sleep through the night until they're two or three years old. Yeah. But it's not the same as infancy. You know, so this race to keep sleeping through the night, why?
Yeah.
What we have to do is help that mother cope with that. And like, okay, this baby is being very fuzzy. How can we help? Okay, so first of all, let's see if we can address this anxiety, depression, or PTSD. But also, what are some ways to calm a baby? And this could be a place where somebody, a support person, could step in. Okay, can I take the baby for a little bit? You feed the baby, and then I'll take the baby for the next hour or two.
Yeah.
Give me a break. Because that's intense. It's really intense. Yeah. If you have a baby with that kind of temperament thing, I would actually want to make sure when you hear a baby that's crying a lot, you want to make sure first this is my lactation consultant hat on. But we want to make sure first of all the baby's getting enough to eat. That's critical. Yeah. Okay, so let's say the baby's gaining wealth. So we know they probably didn't need to eat. But then we want to rule out also too, does the baby have some kind of physical injury? You know, because they do, they get injured in birth. You know, it could be it's just their little heads are like a little the head bones and it's giving them headaches, or that maybe something happened to their call. I mean, this happens all the time. So infiropractic is super helpful. So again, kind of stepping in at each stage of that. Okay, so the mother's anxious during pregnancy. So let's see if we can address that during pregnancy would be ideal. If the baby's fussy after, okay, how can we help the mother cope with that? How can we bring in her support network to cope with that? How can we help treat her anxiety? And how can we also make the whole sleep situation easier? You know, as long as having the baby nearby so she doesn't have to completely wake up to address, you know, nighttime. So these are some environmental things. But what I'm really struck by is it's a very complicated relationship between infant sleep and breastfeeding and mental health. It's not quite as straightforward and it's different than people expect. And actually, and I have put this in writing, so I can't take this back, but it is actually in an article that I published because I said, you know, it's kind of strange, you know, that exclusive breastfeeding mothers have lower rates of depression because they wake up a lot more, they don't get as much sleep. It's actually not true. They do wake up more, but they get more sleep.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think it's because what happens is it takes them less time to get back to sleep. Yeah. And so that's, I think, the key. They don't have to turn on the lights, clean a bottle, put it in. Yep, yep, yep. And so if we can intervene, kind of every step of that. But I think part of it is just this is where I think practitioners do need to kind of step up. Is like, okay, you have anxiety. What are we gonna do about it? And medications are one treatment, but there's lots of other things. There's you know, all kinds of apps that help with anxiety. There's cognitive behavioral therapy, is very effective for it. So again, a lot of times there's interventions that we can do that don't necessarily involve medications. But address it, but address it, assess it, and okay, you got it. Let's look, you know, let's see what we can do about it, let's take some steps.
And I love that you're emphasizing too, just the importance of sleep and that it doesn't have to be eight hours straight through. It's just, are you getting enough? And I I know last time you were here, we talked, we were talking more about pain and chronic pain. And you mentioned that people could induce pain in the body or chronic pain, you know, fibromyalgia sort of scenario by depriving them of sleep. Well, waking them up every time they hit that deep sleep. Waking them up every time they did deep sleep. So it's so interesting because I've internalized that so much that I when I wake up in the if it's morning and I wake up and I'm in pain in my body, I go, I just need more sleep. I will tell my partner I need another hour instead of oh fine, I just gotta get up now. I just know, I just and and it's magic, you know. I get another hour or two of sleep and my body doesn't hurt and I can wake up and do my day and have a totally different disposition with my daughter, and it's so worth it.
So I you know, I think that that's a great application of it. And you know, I think part of the thing too is like, you know, like it where you are in your sleep cycle, a lot of times you can tell by how easy it is for you to get up, right? You know, so if you're awakened from deep sleep, you're like, and and I've learned that one too.
I feel like like I just got shot in the brain, like it's happening right here. Like, oh, it's so painful. And it is deep sleep, it is earlier in the night, right? Because it's usually like I get woken up 20 minutes after I fell asleep. I'm like, you I can't even tell you what day, I have no idea what's going on. I not making any sense. It is so painful. And hopefully I can get back there, right? And get back to sleep. But yeah, there are moments where I'm like, I'm remembering the information you taught me and I'm applying it. And so I want to thank you for that. I'm really actually I don't have enough brain power to consciously think of you in the moment, but overall, you definitely improve my life with that information.
Well, you know, and it's like we think about kind of how can we apply this some others? You know, how can we like partners to do what your partner is doing? Yeah, you know, to like let you have that extra bit of sleep so that you can actually function and feel better. And how can we do that?
And tie it together so they know what that means too, right? Understand it's not just oh yeah, like we're all tired, we all need more sleep. It's like there are moments where it's like, you know, this is really crucial for me.
Well, and it's kind of like I always say there's there's the difference between tired and more tired. Yeah, and like when they get to that more tired, you know, they're hanging on by a thread. That's when we need to step in and don't say something dumb like, well, everybody's tired, right? No, okay, yeah, but this is a little bit extraordinary. And this is when we want to start maybe thinking about like that emergency strategy, make sure she gets like a four-hour stretch. You know, and so you want an awake partner for that because otherwise the mom's gonna wake up, she's gonna hear that baby, she's the one who's wired, she's gonna wake up and hear that baby, you know. And so what we want to do is make sure that the whoever is kind of helping is there to take care of that baby so quickly. Yeah, and again, this is not something you have to do every single night, but you want to get it to a point where there's like a bit of a catch-up, yeah. So try it for a few days, you know, and see if they're feeling I mean, and I think sometimes the first time you get a four-hour stretch when you're in that phase, you wake up the next morning and you feel like you're born again.
I mean, it's just it's amazing. I remember sometime in the first three months, I got six hours straight once, and I felt like I had just been given the most powerful drug. I was like, this is amazing, and I feel great. Wow, that's what sleep does.
Oh, this is good stuff. This is really good. So, I mean, yeah, it's amazing. We can help with that, but at least thinking about you know how even in pregnancy, your mental state actually influences how your baby sleeps, so it also influences how you sleep.
Yeah.
If you have these conditions, chances are your sleep is gonna be poor.
Right.
So it's kind of like that's why it's important to address those things. Yeah, and I don't mean just handing somebody a depression scale. I mean, okay, let's go over this and okay, here are some options for you, and let's check back in a month and see how you're doing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. So is there anything you're researching now that's like a curiosity or a question or a thing that you want to learn, want to know about maternal mental health?
You know, one of the things I just wrote a paper on, and I have to admit, I've been really I won't say depressed about it, but like very saddened by is that research I've been reading about mothers in the military. And I want to know what we can do to make that better, because most of these military branches actually have family advocacy programs and stuff, and yet the rates of depression are just sky high. And that's without military sexual trauma. Okay, so the national rate is 13%. Okay, but for mothers with non with no military sexual trauma, 44%. But you add military sexual trauma to it, 77%. 77% are reporting depression or testing depressed.
Wow, yeah, that's high.
That's that's so high. That is so high. I mean, and and I want to kind of know why, because it's not necessarily just combat exposure. There's something in that culture that's not very supportive, even though I know they're trying. I mean, I know that I've worked with some of these programs, and they've got these visiting moms programs, they've got all these, you know, things to help, and yet they're rates, and it's like we saw that consistently across like four studies with good-sized samples. I was just amazed, and it contributes to negative birth outcomes.
Wow.
I think at one study found something like 28% had preterm babies. Oh the national average is 11%. So it's giving an idea. This is not this is not good. So I think that that's one area that I've been kind of looking into. It's one of the reasons I wrote that paper. So then I decided to track it back. Like what kind of histories are they coming with? Because I have seen articles. We get articles like that in the journal I edit. And, you know, looking back and saying about different veterans and soldiers that oftentimes come in with histories of adversarial experiences, or in the case of women partner violence, you know, and you come in with these histories, then there's a the add added vulnerability of the culture, plus also sometimes combat on top of that.
Yeah.
So that's one area that I've been actually quite concerned with. Yeah, I've been really intrigued with some of the alternative treatments that are on the horizon. Like this repetitive trans magnetic stimulation. It's amazing. It's amazing. It's got a great track record for treating depression in the general population.
Okay.
Just starting to use it now with pneumons. Okay. So it's basically a cap you put on. It's got these little coils, and it what it does is it puts a gentle, very gentle electrical current through the brain and kind of like basically sort of down regulates the parts that aren't supposed to be as active and up regulates the parts that are. It changes the brain, the way the brain is functioning on MRI, and actually stops depression pretty quickly.
Interesting.
Yeah, and it's a very non-invasive, non painful kind of treatment. Yeah. Is actually showing something very interesting. They're using that again in the general population, 500 milligrams twice a day. Okay. But it's anti inflammatory. So that's going to be, of course, it's going to work for that. I actually was convinced enough. I started taking it myself. There you go. I thought, yeah, this is good stuff. Yeah. Vitamin D deficiency. I think is a big one to look at. So I'm really very gratified to see so many great treatments alternatives on the horizon.
Yeah.
They're coming. You know, you can see it. They're just starting to come into the postpartum space, but they've been in, they've had a track record. You know, even like ketamine for severe suicidal depression, obviously under very close supervision, you're not taking it home. You're using it in the doctor's office, but actually helps break that really suicidal depression.
Okay.
Really, that's exciting to me. And that's a treatment that's becoming more and more available. Acupuncture with depression. Very good, very good. Because what we've started getting is review articles from China. So Chinese authors are able to read the Chinese literature and then translate it into English.
That's amazing.
Yeah. So there's some really good exciting things. So there's certain populations that are at definitely at high risk that worry me a lot. You know, but I see other things that are actually really helpful.
Yeah. It's great to just think of and have that brainstorm of all these things that are helping, all these options, right? Just to hear that there are options can be and then to find the one that's like, oh, that sounds good to me. I want to talk to my healthcare provider about that. Right.
Otherwise, you know, if you if you only present medication, then people are kind of like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to take that. You know, and that happens a lot. You know, it could be part of the culture. There's a lot of cultures that just don't trust, you know, what one paper described as Anglo medicine. Sure. You know, or if you look in the African-American community, a lot of times there's a strong distrust of medical establishment. They have a track record with that. There's been a lot of abuses. And so again, they're very leery about a lot of these psychotropic medications, and they're not really acceptable. And it's like sometimes they're the appropriate treatment. You know, if you got somebody who's like absolutely adamant against them, you know, we talk about the plus SIBO effect, there's no such a thing as a no SIBO effect. No SIBO, too, right? Yeah. You can actually cancel, you can cancel out the positive effects. It's amazing, actually, that you can do that with your brain.
Well, I want to thank you so much for coming back and talking through all of these layers and all these options. I feel like not just for mothers and for women, but for anyone who's parenting. Anyone who's parenting and just for anyone who's a human and a member of society, just continue to value and include. Obviously, we all came from somewhere, but right. I'm pretty sure that's some form of mom.
Yeah, exactly. You know, I was watching a talk the other day and they were kind of like, How many of you are mothers or fathers? And not very many people raise their hand. How many of you had mothers and fathers?
People are like, yeah. Do I have to still talk to them to raise a hand? Yeah, yeah.
Right, exactly. But you know, as we said, we all come from someplace. I I really, you know, want to see us take this as a really important measure. I would actually really recommend that talk PPD by Office of Women's Health. That's actually a really excellent program. They did a bunch of great. Yeah, so take a look. That's a good resource. And naturally, the very excellent book, Depression and New Mothers.
Yes, very excellent. Depression and New Mothers, Volume One, Volume Two.
Volume one, volume two. Yeah, volume two is where we get into like the assessment and all the treatments. And you know, if you really want to know like the evidence base for the various treatments and stuff, it's all there.
Okay. And people can find you on your website.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Kathleen Kendall-tack it.com.
Yep. And we're posting uh we've been posting some webinars and stuff that we I've been doing. So there's a lot of information available.
Amazing. Yeah, and I see you do things um specific to breastfeeding there too. So there's some resources on that.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah.
And actually, as you mentioned, art. If you would if any of your listeners would like some free art, if you go to my preclarispress.com and go to the section mark art, there's a lot of free downloads. Oh, nice. There's some nice posters and some, you know, things like um, and if you have any ideas, you know, let us know. Because we take stuff. And uh, we we a lot of times, you know, get pictures sent to us of like this is my vision board. I use this for my birthday moms, and this is my nice. Oh, that's got a lot on birth, and he's got a lot on breastfeeding and you know, just kind of general kind of postpartum. So um, yeah, there like you know, there's a lot of free stuff. There's some stock art that's actually really inexpensive, but the free stuff is like that's what I really want to read toward.
And that's Clarispress.com. And we'll put a link in the show notes for that.
Yeah, that'd be good.
Thank you so much, Dr. Kathleen Kendall Tackett, for bringing all of your brilliance here and helping to support and value postpartum moms, new moms, mothers, parents, people who are raising children. I so appreciate all your work and everything you've shared with us today.
Well, thank you very much, and thank you so much for the work that you're doing and like really reaching across all these different groups to integrate all this information and your support of families, especially going through this pretty vulnerable period.
Yes, thank you. And I don't know if anyone heard. If you're on video, you might be able to catch a a glimpse of a puppy who's been here the whole time. Oh, yeah, yeah, I saw being so good. Let's get Boomy on the screen here.
Well, I actually have a cat laying behind my computer. He has actually been very good. Oh, is he cute? Wow, he's massive.
Cute, like 85 pounds. He looks like an Irish wolfhound, actually, but I don't think yeah, he kind of does across the face. Yeah, he's got that big jaw. Hey, buddy, you want to say hi? Boomy bear. What's his name? Boomy, B-U-M-I. Boomy. Oh, isn't that cute? That's a cute name. I love it. I love it. Good boy, thanks for being here. Yeah, you're good boy. You're good boy. Thank you so much for listening. Now, I'd really love to hear from you. What resonated with you in this episode and what's on your mind and in your heart as we bring this conversation to a close? Email me at info at how we can heal.com or share your answers and what's been healing for you in the comments on Instagram, or you'll find me at How We Can Heal. Don't forget to go to howwecanheal.com to sign up for email updates as well. You'll also find additional trainings, tons of free resources, and the full transcript of each and every show. If you love the show, please leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you're listening to this podcast right now. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe and keep sharing the shows you love the most with all of your friends. Visit how we can heal.com forward slash podcast to share your thoughts and ideas for the show. I always, always love hearing from you. Before we wrap up for today, I want to be super clear that this podcast isn't offering prescriptions. It's not advice, nor is it any kind of mental health treatment or diagnosis. Your decisions are in your hands, and I encourage you to consult with any healthcare professionals you may need to support you through your unique path of healing. In addition, everyone's opinion here is their own, and opinions can change. Guests share their thoughts, not that of the host or sponsors. I'd like to thank our guests today, everyone who helped support this podcast directly and indirectly. Alex, thanks for taking care of the babe and taking the fur babies out while I record. Last and never least, I'd like to give a special shout out to my big brother Matt, who passed away in 2002. He wrote this music and it makes my heart so very happy to share it with you here.
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