Mijke Lambregtse-van den Berg
Mijke Lambregtse-van den Berg is a perinatal psychiatrist, infant psychiatrist and infant mental health specialist. Associate professor at the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Her clinical and research work is focused on perinatal psychiatry and offspring development: How to prevent these disorders and the transmission from mother or father to the child? She is working with families during pregancy that need a special care until the children are 4 years old. Psychiatric and somatic problems. She works with obstetrics and muinicipalities. Mijke developed and implemented a public screening program, in routine obstetric care: Mind2Care, an online questionnaire, that families have to fill in, about psychiatric symptoms, psychosocial symptoms and substance use. When completed they immediately get a treatment advice and they can discuss it with their obstetrician. In NL: it is implemented in about 1/3 of all obstetric care. Mind2Care has already been translated in many different languages to be able to implement it in other countries.
Claire Wilson
Claire Wilson is a psychiatrist and a researcher. She works at Kings College London and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. She works broadly in the field of perinatal mental health and in epidemiology. In her clinical practice, she sees patients who are experiencing perinatal mental illnesses. Perinatal means preconception, during pregnancy and up to one year of postpartum.
During her PhD, she explored the impact of gestational diabetes (diabetes during pregnancy), on the mental health of women and also the development of their children. She saw an increase in depression and anxiety, when women experience gestational diabetes.
Probably about one in 10 women, possibly even more, suffer from anxiety or depression during the perinatal period.
Pregnancy is a big life event; implications for the developing child are important. There are a number of emotions that women with gestational diabetes may experience including guilt (because we know that being overweight is sometimes a risk factor for gestational diabetes) and worry about what will happen to their baby.
