This week is Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week – a time to rightfully shine a light on all the big and small impacts of pregnancy, birth and parenting on mothers.
But.
I’d like to gently widen the beam of light to include someone often left out of this narrative: the father.
I’m totally here for discussions about maternal overwhelm, identity shifts in motherhood, matrescence, birth trauma – the lot. But running parallel to these discussions? The partner, often overlooked, sometimes dismissed and otherwise expected to ‘be strong’.
- 1 in 10 fathers experience postnatal depression or anxiety.
- This rate increases significantly if the birthing partner is also struggling.
- Dads are rarely asked how they’re doing at any professional checkpoint.
- Approximately 6% of fathers report symptoms consistent with PTSD after witnessing a traumatic birth (and these are just the ones who report!).
What I hear in the therapy room, and from male friends – ‘I didn’t want to make it about me’, ‘she was the one who went through it, anything I felt didn’t matter’, ‘it doesn’t feel like I’m allowed to struggle’.
The problem with all these messages? That secondary, vicarious trauma is absolutely and entirely a valid and shit-scary experience. All your brain knows, regardless of if you went through it or watched it unfold is: ‘big problem – scary thing – deploy anxiety’.
Culturally, men are often expected to be ‘strong’ (although thankfully the narrative is shifting, oh-so-slightly), to go back to work mere days after experiencing this life-altering baby-shaped bomb. There are perinatal mental health services across the UK (slowly expanding with their much-needed compassionate expertise), but they are overwhelmingly designed for and focused on mothers.
Even when support is ‘technically’ available (I know locally we have Dad Matters that dads can be signposted to), the fathers I speak with overwhelmingly tell me that they’re not asked how they’re doing, they feel like a ‘plus one’ in maternity spaces and they’re just not made aware of services that are available to them.
Maternal Mental Health Week matters deeply – I say this from the lens of both personal experience and professional awareness – but so does paternal mental health. Families are systems – and when we widen that beam, there is space enough for everyone.
If you’re a father reading this, some of this speaks to you and you’d like a space of your own to explore further, get in touch with me here.
And if you support families in any capacity? I invite you to take a moment to consider how your service might better include the voices that aren’t necessarily the ones making the most noise.
Thanks for reading. If something in this piece stirred something in you, or you’re wondering what it might be like to explore these themes in therapy, you’re welcome to reach out. I offer sessions in-person at the therapy and counselling centre I run in Cheshire, and a limited amount of online sessions across the UK. You can find out more by heading to Insightful Life – Therapy & Counselling Centre
Insightful Life 
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