Pregnancy and Mental Health
Happy Mental Health Awareness Month!
May is the month for mental health, and as the month comes to a close I can't help but think that with all of the chaos this last year has brought there's never been a more important time to check in with yourself! So let's check-in together. How are you? How have you been? And, maybe most importantly, what have you done to help support yourself and your mental health lately?
“These questions, though incredibly simple in and of themselves, can be ridiculously difficult to answer!”
Take it from a professional bottle-upper, emotions can be tricky! Mental health is something that tends to get tossed to the wayside unless we're in crisis, but crisis isn't the only time you need to prioritize it! Just as you'd go in for a routine physical or dental appointment to take care of your PHYSICAL health, you should also be making sure your MENTAL health is up to snuff. Luckily, though mental health has had a tendency to be overlooked in the past, there has been a rising interest in mental health awareness, especially after this past year.
Mental health awareness month began way back in 1949, made official by the Mental Health America organization whose founder, Clifford Whittingham Beers, had extensive experience within the mental health field throughout his life both personally and through his family members, all of whom suffered from varying mental health disorders. His experiences shed light on how grossly overlooked and mistreated the mental health field was and can still be, and ultimately drove him to work towards change, lead to his organization, and to his book "A Mind That Found Itself".
“How does all of this tie into pregnancy?”
Mental health plays a huge role in everyone’s day-to-day lives, and this is incredibly present both during pregnancy and after! The thing is... we all hear about the main mental health concerns post-pregnancy. Baby blues, postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety. We know of these and, whether or not we think we'll suffer from them, we know to look out for them. But what about DURING pregnancy?
The overwhelming majority of information we receive during pregnancy is...
