EP: 1 Our Meet Cute Story

Which I think is just hilarious because both you and I thought that we were, like, the only two that-

Yeah

... integrated both perinatal mental health and infant early childhood mental health because, I mean, the whole reason that this podcast exists is because often those two worlds are very separate.

Early childhood, um, like preschool and all that stuff is its own place.

Infant toddler, that type of stuff is in its own place.

And then perinatal mental health is also an- in another place altogether.

But guess what? When you have kids, all of that stuff is tied together.

Yes.

And it shows up in so many different ways.

Yeah.

And I think that's where you and I had talked about Originally in our first Zoom conversation was the frustration of working in infant mental health and not being able to, like, talk to the parent about their mental health because they weren't the client, so you couldn't bill for it.

But it was like, but there's so much going on with the parent's mental health that we need to address, and there was no...

At least for me, if I remember correctly, it was also true for you.

There was, like, no place to send them specifically to deal with perinatal mental health 'cause the county didn't have that kind of service.

And so I think when we were both working towards our own program, we were like, and our own companies, like, "We need to do this together 'cause I can't do my infant mental health work without also supporting the parent's mental health." Um, and so yeah, it was just great to see so many people that also agreed with us and, like, I think we were like, "Oh my God, we're not actually alone.

This is not, like, this out of realm idea that we just created, but there are other people that are doing this work and are interested in this work." And we were just, like, again, super happy to connect with each other, but, like, so excited to connect with so many other people across the count- like, the country that are also, like, wanting to do similar work too.

And not only that, just people that were just so excited by it-

Mm-hmm

... and looking at it from different perspective, whether that's in psychiatry programs-

Mm-hmm

... um, in gra- like graduate programs, right? Um, looking at it from the hospital standpoint.

There are just, like, just so many avenues and so many, so many touch points really of where this work, um, crosses the boundaries, but the infrastructure doesn't really exist quite yet, which is part of the frustration in the conversation because we obviously did talk about, like, who do you bill for? Who is the identified patient?

Mm-hmm.

Um, and I, you know, thinking back on work that I've done working in child welfare, um, child welfa- welfare often does the trauma of separating the child and the parent, and not even take into account that while perinatal mental health, like, does exist, often chi- oftentimes the child is removed because of the caregiver's mental health.

But then how are we actually supporting the caregiver, right?