Special Edition: Helping Moms Before Crisis

Adrienne Griffen (0:00)

Mental health conditions are the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths.

Erica Mandy (0:05)

Today is Saturday, September 5th. It's a statistic many people don't know. And here's another one. One in five women will experience a mental health condition during pregnancy or in the year after giving birth. And now, the trial of Lindsay Clancy has put maternal mental health in the national spotlight. If you haven't heard of this case yet, Lindsay Clancy is a Massachusetts mother and former labor and delivery nurse who killed her three young children in 2023 She also jumped out of a window, leaving her paralyzed. Prosecutors say she knew what she was doing, but her defense argues she's not guilty due to insanity, specifically with postpartum psychosis. The jury had been deliberating this week, but on Friday, the judge declared a mistrial because the jury was not able to agree on a verdict. Now, prosecutors will have to decide whether to take the case to trial again.

Either way, it's of course a devastating case. So today, we're not here to relitigate it, but we are using this moment to better understand maternal mental health from postpartum depression and anxiety to the much rarer but more serious condition of postpartum psychosis, and what families should know before symptoms reach a crisis point. Today, we're joined by Adrienne Griffen, a nationally recognized expert and advocate in maternal mental health, and the executive director of the nonpartisan nonprofit, Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance. She also describes her own lived experience with postpartum depression. How to tell the difference between the regular baby blues and when it's time to get help, and what to do before the baby even arrives to try to prevent the most severe cases.

Welcome to the NewsWorthy Special Edition Saturday, when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes, where we provide all the day's news in less than 15 minutes. I'm Erica Mandy, it's now time for today's Special Edition Saturday.

Adrienne Griffen, thank you so much for joining us here on The NewsWorthy.

Adrienne Griffen (1:55)

Thank you so much, Erica, for having me on the show.

Erica Mandy (1:58)

So I first want to touch base about the Lindsay Clancy trial. It's put a spotlight on maternal mental health and specifically postpartum psychosis. So what has been going through your mind as you've seen this case unfold?

Adrienne Griffen (2:13)

Well, it is such a horrible tragedy what this family is going through. When we talk about maternal mental health, it's really a range of mental health conditions that can impact women either during pregnancy or the first year following pregnancy.

And it really, it starts with something very basic called the baby blitz.

This impacts almost 80% of women in the first couple of weeks after the baby is born. As your body recovers from the physical and emotional changes that occurred in pregnancy, it can be labor and delivery, very, very common, mom's blood can be up and down. She may be laughing one minute, crying the next, but it doesn't really interfere with her ability to deal with life and with her daily tasks. The next more serious illnesses would be anxiety and depression, and these actually often start during pregnancy and then get worse in a post-partum period. And then the very far extreme is postpartum psychosis. This is the most serious of the mental health conditions. Impacts about one to two women per 1,000 births, and it increases the risk of both suicidality and infanticide, and it's a medical emergency. Women experiencing postpartum psychosis need most often to be hospitalized, definitely need intensive psychiatric care to make sure that they don't hurt themselves or their children. And what's very interesting about postpartum psychosis is that the symptoms can wax and wane. It's not like somebody has a break and they are psychotic forever. They could be psychotic for a couple of minutes, they could be sort of covering their symptoms. So it's sometimes very difficult to actually assess if somebody is in a psychotic moment.

Erica Mandy (4:06)

If you have that and then it goes away, you might question, oh, I was just dreaming where people might not get the help they need.

Adrienne Griffen (4:13)

Absolutely. Very well said. What happens when somebody is experiencing psychosis is that they're at increased risk of having delusions or hallucinations. That means they're hearing or seeing things that may or may not be there. Oftentimes, particularly women in the postpartum period, if they go for a prolonged period without sleep, it can bring on an experience of mania or psychosis.