A few months ago, Dr. Dawn Kingston reached out to me and I was very pleased to hear that she loves the encouragement and positivity for moms on my blog and how she appreciates “all of the wonderful content that helps expectant and new mothers own their emotional wellbeing!”
I was excited to hear that she wanted to work together to help spread the message further and empowering women to know what is going on with their mental health and give them the tools to do something about it.
Dr. Dawn Kingston is Canada’s leading expert on perinatal mental health and she regularly writes about prenatal anxiety and depression self-care, to help women successfully navigate the unique stresses that affect perinatal emotional health, which is something I’m very passionate about.
Here are some of Dr. Kingston’s accolades:
- She’s one of North America’s only endowed research chair in the area of perinatal mental health. Her research program is based at the University of Calgary.
- For over ten years, she’s been at the forefront of research on how to prevent postpartum depression. The key?….Catching it early, during pregnancy!
- Dr. Kingston and her team developed the HOPE App which is designed to significantly reduce prenatal anxiety and depression and directly support expectant mothers. They are studying it in a massive implementation study, one of the most ambitious projects of this type ever!
Dr. Kingston was so kind to provide a free tool you or someone you care about can use to spot the difference between mood swings, depression, and anxiety. I love this self-check tool because there’s so much stigma around these issues that sometimes we don’t want to accept that something is going on and we wait too long to get help.
Being aware of my struggles with depression and anxiety has been a gift to me, allowing me to own my emotional wellbeing in pregnancy and beyond.
Make sure you share this tool everywhere because someone you know and love may going through mood swings, depression, and anxiety and you don’t know it – they may not even know it!
[ela]