It can be frightening, however, to ask for mental health support. Life stressors, hormonal shifts, birth trauma, and pre-existing mental health vulnerabilities-teamed with the profound life transition of new parenthood-can create a perfect storm. Perinatal anxiety and depression are common: up to one in five Australian birthing parents and 1-in-10 non-birthing parents experience a mental health decline before or after having a baby. Anchored by my laptop and headset, I let a tide of others’ mental anguish sweep over me. My three young children pretend to home-school in the lounge. My husband teaches high school from the shed. My workspace is now a tiny desk in the corner of my nine-year-old daughter’s bedroom. It is March 2020, and the perinatal mental health service I work for has just gone remote. Plastic bags, scissors, kitchen knives, a low-hanging curtain cord, electrical sockets-all await the gleeful attention of the coming baby. He slurps water from the dog’s bowl, guzzles poison from a bottle easily extracted from an unsecured cupboard, pulls a pot of bubbling soup off the stovetop onto his face. ‘Having a baby! I had that contented feeling that I was doing what I was really made to do.’ Cut to a kitchen interior, where Jane’s imagination conjures a wildly escalating series of catastrophic predictions involving her future infant. ‘It felt so good, like the first barefoot day of summer,’ she narrates. In Sarah Watt’s 1995 animated short film, Small Treasures, newly pregnant Jane floats alone on the ocean’s surface.
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