“Let’s stand united, hearts entwined,
Raise awareness, be the light that’s shined,
For the women who bring life to Earth,
Deserve our care, their sacred worth.
In the stillness of her soul, we find,
The strength and grace of womankind,
With support, compassion, we’ll impart,
A healing balm for her tender heart.”
- Fredua A. Boateng, 2024
These words come from a poem written about postpartum care and support by Ghanaian poet Fredua A. Boateng. They feel especially close to home this month, as the nation watches the trial of Lindsay Clancy unfold, a case that has opened a painful but necessary conversation about postpartum mental health treatment. Across the country, women in the depths of their own postpartum experience, and those simply reflecting on their own, can recognize in these lines the profound “strength and grace of womankind” and the aching need for support, compassion, and “a healing balm.”
One sentiment keeps surfacing across news outlets and social media: mothers need specialized care for postpartum mental health conditions, real care, not an afterthought. They need a place where they are seen, heard, understood, and met with both warmth and clinical expertise.
That is exactly the gap Sierra Meadows Behavioral Health was built to close. We envision a community where everyone has access to the mental health care they need and deserve. We find the gaps in treatment and build specialty programs to meet our community where the need is greatest.
To meet this need, we created the Maternal Mental Health Intensive Outpatient Program, a specialty treatment track designed for pregnant women and mothers navigating postpartum mental health conditions. It is carefully built around the whole picture of early motherhood. Treatment includes:
- Free on-site childcare for children up to 4 years old: Dedicated childcare removes the single biggest barrier keeping postpartum patients from completing IOP-level treatment: the lack of somewhere safe to leave their baby. It also gives mothers something equally vital: a true reprieve and the space to be fully present in their own healing.
- Infant-inclusive groups (children under 12 months): Sessions are structured to include the patient’s infant, if appropriate, supporting dyadic bonding, in-vivo attachment coaching, and real-time clinical observation of the parent-infant relationship.
- Diagnostic specialty group therapy: Every member of the group shares a perinatal mood or anxiety diagnosis, which means the therapeutic work, including attachment, birth trauma, identity shift, intrusive thoughts around infant harm, sleep deprivation, and hormonal mood dysregulation, is specific to their needs. Mothers are treated alongside mothers who understand.
- Individual therapy: One-on-one sessions give each mother a space entirely her own, with room to process what the group can’t always hold and to work through her story at her own pace.
- Coordinated psychiatric oversight: Every mother meets weekly to discuss medications with a psychiatric prescriber. Their care is overseen by a team that communicates with one another, with psychiatric, therapeutic, and medical providers working in tandem so nothing falls through the cracks.
- Parent and emotion regulation coaching: One-on-one coaching builds caregiving confidence, helps mothers read infant cues, and supports co-regulation. It is woven directly into the fabric of group and individual therapy, not offered as an afterthought.
This is what it looks like to build a healing balm into a clinical program: not just treatment for the mind, but care extended to the whole mother.