ABSTRACT
Becoming a mother is a life-changing experience for most women that very few other life transitions can match. For many, motherhood also brings psychological and emotional challenges that are not only unexpected but radically conflict with normative, middle-class, white idealisations of the mother and the mothering experience. In Australia, as in many other countries, one in five women will be diagnosed with postpartum depression within the first two years of their child’s birth. However, far greater numbers will experience a negative impact on their mental health and well-being than these numbers suggest, which can extend well-beyond the early years of their children’s lives. While there has been growing awareness of the need to properly support women to prevent postpartum depression and other mental health problems after birth, pathologising and individualistic medicalised approaches continue to dominate professional knowledge and practice as well as popular understandings. In particular, there has been little engagement with the question of how social disadvantages associated with class, race, ability and sexuality intersect with gender inequality to produce vastly different experiences of mothering and mental well-being. Intimate partner violence (IPV) is also part of this picture, because pregnancy places women at increased risk of violence and IPV is independently associated with trauma and mental illness. Women who are socially disadvantaged are known to be at much greater risk of mental health problems as mothers, yet medical and psychological approaches offer little insight into how the social contexts of their lives place them at particular risk. This chapter explores an intersectional approach to understanding and supporting women who experience mental health problems as mothers. In addition to challenging pathologising medical approaches to mental illness in motherhood, the chapter considers how the challenges of mothering in contexts of social disadvantage might be taken into account in developing supports that emotionally sustain and value women through their mothering journeys, recognising their strengths as well as vulnerabilities as mothers in diverse social contexts.
