What happens when you are not unwell enough for specialist support, but you are not OK either?
For years, I have listened to women trying to make sense of difficult, complicated and traumatic birth experiences. Women who are functioning, mothering, back to work and just about getting through their days, but inside are still carrying the physical and mental load of what happened to them.
They may not meet the threshold for specialist perinatal mental health services or receive a diagnosis for this feeling. They may simply be told that their baby is healthy, their birth is over and everything is fine. They are not fine.
There is very little in between.
The Birth Recovery Project is being developed to change that.
There is a significant gap between routine postnatal care and specialist perinatal mental health services and many women fall straight into it. Birth recovery is not only about diagnosing birth trauma or treating mental illness. It can be about understanding what happened. Processing a birth that did not go as expected, feeling safe in your body again, rebuilding confidence, recovering physically and emotionally, being heard and having somewhere to go before things reach crisis point.
The Birth Recovery Project is exploring what meaningful, accessible support in this space could look like. Not another service designed for women without women. Something built alongside them.
LISTEN
Women’s experiences have to come first.
The first stage of The Birth Recovery Project is listening.
Gathering women’s experiences of birth, postpartum recovery and the support they received afterwards.
What helped?
What was missing?
Where did women go when they were struggling?
What would they have wanted someone to offer?
Through conversations, storytelling, focus groups and lived experience, the project will begin to build a clearer picture of what women actually need after birth because before we create another service, we need to understand the problem properly.
TRAIN
Building birth recovery knowledge within communities.
One of the ambitions of the project is to develop a network of midwives and practitioners with specialist skills in birth and postpartum recovery.
People who understand birth physiology, maternity systems, trauma, nervous system recovery and the complicated emotional experience of becoming a mother.
With appropriate training, supervision and support, and funding they could become Birth Recovery Champions within their own communities, offering individual and group support and creating a wider network of accessible care.
The longer-term vision is bigger than one practitioner or one location. It is about developing a model that could reach women across the UK.
SUPPORT
Accessible birth and postpartum recovery support.
The longer-term aim is to develop practical, trauma-informed support for women who currently sit within this gap.
This could include individual birth recovery support, facilitated groups, birth debriefing and recovery work, accessible resources and community-based support.
Support should not depend on being able to afford private care.
Women should not have to become significantly unwell before someone helps them.
The project will explore how this work could be funded and delivered so that meaningful recovery support becomes accessible within communities.
WHY NOW?
We talk increasingly about birth trauma and maternal mental health. There is still far less conversation about recovery.
What happens in the weeks, months and sometimes years after a difficult birth?
Where does a woman go when she knows something is not right but does not know what she needs?
Why do so many women have to find their own way through it?
What might change if recovery was considered part of maternity care rather than something women were expected to manage alone?
These are the questions behind The Birth Recovery Project.
THIS IS THE BEGINNING
The Birth Recovery Project is currently bringing together a small advisory group of people with experience across midwifery, maternity care, birth trauma, perinatal mental health, women’s health, community services, research and lived experience.