Parent Mental Health Day is held on 30th January, with the theme Creating Positive Connections.
To mark the day Gillian Meens, manager of the Small Talk programme for lone parents shares her own experience of the necessity of community for parents and how peer support can make the world of difference.
I love being a mum, I love my kids but almost nothing else has tested my mental health in the same way. After years of working in self-management and wellbeing support, I thought I had patience, I thought I had resilience, I thought I knew how to look after myself…
It turns out having children was where I found the end of my own resilience and the beginning of a new type of solidarity and support that I hadn’t experienced before.
When my eldest was born, I’d had a difficult pregnancy and a traumatic birth experience followed by feeding issues caused by tongue tie. Then, when he was a few months old, my son’s ‘harmless’ hemangioma (birth mark) on his head blistered and burst which resulted in a hospital stay in a burns ward. Meanwhile, I was moving through the motions, exhausted and detached from everything. I knew parenthood was going to be hard, but I didn’t realise it was going to be this hard.
Three stories stick out to me of how my friends and community had my back. A few weeks in, we were struggling. My son wasn’t feeding well, I was struggling with recovery and we felt like we were falling apart. My friend messaged and asked if she could come around and help. It was genuine. Not a ‘can I come around and help’ but really ‘can I come cuddle your baby while you run around cleaning up and bringing me cups of tea’. All well intended, but a lot of guests had looked like the latter. I asked her if she would help clean the house for me. A simple request, but I found my anxious energy was being directed into that and I knew it wasn’t helping me recover or establish feeding with my baby. I remember she came around, chatted with me for a bit and then cleaned. She did the dishes, she cleaned our bathroom and let me rest and just be. I cried with gratitude.
A little while later, I was due to come to a newly found mum friend’s house for both of us to get our hair cut by another of our ‘First Steps’ mums who was building up her home hair cutting service. For context, the First Steps groups were set up by our local health visitors for mums to come to a weekly class together when babies were around 8-10 weeks for around 4 weeks, I honestly can’t remember much about what they taught us but I do remember the friends I made there. Back to the story…When I got to the house, I was late, like really, late. The hairdresser had left by time I turned up. I can’t even remember what that morning looked like. Much of that time is a blur. But when I arrived and realised I had let someone down and missed out on something remotely resembling self-care, I broke down. My mum friend – on her third child and who had likely seen it all before - gently took me and my little one into her house. Let him play, made me a green tea and had a chat, then sent me home with some homemade curry. It was simple but it was healing. I can’t remember that morning, but I can remember how her care made me feel.
Fast forward a few years and baby no.2 arrived. We found out we were pregnant just as covid lockdown was announced in March 2020. I remember thinking, ‘great I won’t have to hide my nausea and fatigue from everyone’. In reality, almost no one, other than the midwives and my neighbours at our weekly ‘clap for the NHS’, saw my bump at all.
This time, no major complications with birth or feeding and no visitors either. This time, the loneliness and detachment were of a different kind. I had a toddler at home, worries of the impact of covid during pregnancy, on our hospital visits, and with a tiny baby. Constant testing, changes in rules, no visitors to help but once again, I had some truly magnificent people who stepped in.
We had friends from our church who dropped meals at our door for the first few weeks. And the relief of not having to make meals for 3 hungry mouths was immense. They also dropped in toys & magazines for my oldest, probably recognising the challenge of keeping him happy and entertained when almost everything was closed. It made me feel a sense of connection and support when I felt distant and without the face-to-face support of friends like the last time.
Once again, the ‘First Steps’ group were a lifeline, though this time, all online. Very quickly we became a group that was less about the babies and more about looking out for one another. When we could, we met for walks with the prams and coffees in the park despite it being freezing. Those chats kept me sane. The WhatsApp group became a place of solidarity and support in place of health visitors, baby groups and face-to-face chats at playgroups.
I look back and recognise now that with both my boys, I likely experienced post-natal depression and anxiety. The thing is, I didn’t realise it, or if I did, I certainly didn’t want to admit it to myself or anyone else. As I reflected on it, I think I thought that if I was to admit it, it would mean I had ‘failed’. I had failed at what should be natural.
Part of the picture, I think, was that as someone with a tendency to ‘type A’ I struggled to compute that I couldn’t do this, or do it well. Or to put it another way, I was attempting to ‘get it right’ all the time, while it was something you can’t healthily approach this way. I had failed. I had failed at something which wasn’t a test, and the stress and anxiety that brought was crushing at times. The thing that brought me back to reality though was speaking to other mums. They helped put into perspective the realities of life with a little one and brought me back many times from spiraling. And as I came out of the fog of little babies and determined toddlers, the fog of anxiety lifted too.
I started at the Mental Health Foundation 3 years ago, bringing my background in wellbeing and family work together with my personal experience as a mum of two. I was tasked with looking at support needs for lone parents, for a now well-established project called “Small Talk”.
As I worked with other organisations to look at the needs of lone parents in the perinatal period (pregnancy and the early years), peer support came up, a lot. I recognised then, just how fortunate I had been and that many parents don’t have access to, or feel able to access, the support that I had from other people going through similar experiences to me. This paired with my own experiences of care and support from groups of other parents, made me really passionate about working together to ensure all parents could get the kind of support that I did.
Accessing groups not only made for good experiences for me and my baby but where those groups fostered relationships with others, they also became places of precious knowledge and care. Without a doubt peer support has supported me and countless others but in an unequal society, we have unequal levels of support as well as the many types of stigma which make it so hard to open up and find support when it’s needed.
Having a baby can be a really isolating experience (even with a support network) and we can feel we have to figure it all out ourselves but thankfully, we don’t. I hope by supporting organisations to create more spaces for peer support with the Small Talk framework, new parents just might find that so many others are struggling with exactly the same things they are. I don’t know how things would have looked for me without the support of other parents and my friends and family but I certainly know I was better for it. When my cup was empty, others helped me fill it up.
Further support
Visit the Maternal Mental Health Alliance for more information
There are different perinatal mental health problems with differing symptoms, and you or a loved one may not even realise that what you’re experiencing could be an illness. To help you spot signs that you or a loved one may need help, please consider the following questions:
- Do you/they have new feelings and thoughts which you/they have never had before, and which make you/them disturbed or anxious?
- Are you/they experiencing thoughts of suicide or harming yourself/themselves in violent ways?
- Are you/they thinking they are a bad mum, as though you/they can’t cope, or feeling disconnected from the baby?
- Do you feel you/they are getting worse?
If you or a loved one answer(s) ‘Yes’ to any of the above, please contact one of the support services below and get the professional help you need.
If you are concerned about your mental health, or the mental health of someone you know, it is important to either:
- Talk to a health professional, such as a GP, midwife, health visitor or therapy service
- Go to A&E at your local hospital
- Call the Samaritans on 116 123 (free to call and will not appear on your phone bill), or email [email protected]
- Call Lifeline (Northern Ireland only) on 0808 808 8000 (free of charge)
- Access mental health services
If you don't want to speak to a healthcare professional, or someone you know, you could try a charity.
PANDAS offers hope, empathy and support for every parent experiencing difficulties with their emotional wellbeing or mental health. You can speak to their trained volunteers on the phone (0808 1961 776), over email, or even on Whatsapp.
There's a list of local and national charities on the Maternal Mental Health Alliance website.
Mental Health Awareness Week 2025
This year, Mental Health Awareness Week will take place from 12 to 18 May 2025. The theme for 2025 is 'Community'.
Get involved