Postpartum Pittsburgh is proud to present this opportunity for professionals in diverse specialties to gain knowledge in best treatment practices for perinatal women with mental health disorders.

Perinatal depression is a prevalent public health problem which affects at least 14.5% (1 out of 7) of new mothers, with two to three-fold higher rates in minority, single, and low-income mothers. The health of perinatal women is critical to shaping the physical, socio-emotional, and behavioral development of offspring. Many mothers go untreated due to lack of knowledge about how to identify perinatal mental illness as well as lack of knowledge about evidence-based treatments and preventive strategies in the perinatal period. Given the high prevalence, extensive impact, and complexity of treating perinatal mental health disorders, it is imperative to update and increase consistency in knowledge disseminated to practitioners who have contact with childbearing individuals, which not only includes therapists and psychiatrists, but also practitioners of primary care, obstetrics and gynecology, general adult psychiatry, pediatrics, as well as nurses and social workers in all these clinical settings. 

Structural racism has shaped the practice of medicine overall and particularly Obstetrics and Gynecology and Psychiatry. In the past year it has been highlighted that racism, not race, is the cause for increased pregnancy-associated morbidity and mortality in people of color. Severe maternal morbidity (SMM) occurs at rates 3-4-fold higher in black relative to white women and is 12-fold higher in some cities. While psychiatric illness and substance use disorders both contribute to and increase after pregnancy-associated morbidity, birthing people of color are often deterred from seeking and maintaining mental health care. For some, there is a distrust of the healthcare system because of past victimization and trauma, or fear that seeking treatment will be punitive, such as having their children removed from their care. There are myriad additional barriers, including lack of providers of color, lack of culturally relevant care, long wait times for mental health appointments, lack of childcare during appointments, lack of transportation, patient prioritization of more emergent problems in the family or home, the stigma of seeking out mental health services, high cost of care, and lack of health insurance. 

In Pittsburgh, like other communities, there is a need for broader anti-racism and implicit bias training and an ongoing commitment to said practices so that non-Black providers can deepen their understanding of how to deliver culturally responsive and trauma-informed mental health care. Improved cross-cultural and academic-private-community communication not only has the potential to improve the care that is already available, but it also has the potential to lead to new programmatic collaborations that leverage collective resources to make larger scale changes to mitigate the disproportionate morbidity and mortality in childbearing women of color. Pittsburgh has insufficient numbers of Black mental health practitioners. We know that patients fare better when their providers look like them; therefore, there is a critical need to partner with Black-led organizations in providing care for these groups of women and to contribute to opportunities for bringing more Black individuals into the pipeline to become perinatal mental health specialists.