I wanted to write a short piece on why we set up UPLIFT and the Me & Ma social media channels.
I’m George. I’m a doctor specialising in mental illness. I’m also a researcher and as part of my job I aim to improve our understanding of mental illness so we can better look after people when they are unwell.
I have to admit, most of my work relates to older people! However, an opportunity to think about how to best care for asylum seeking or refugee mothers who have experienced mental illness arose, and I wanted to help.
You see the thing is, the research world doesn’t know much about how to best care for people experiencing mental illness at or around the time of childbirth who have the added stressors of migration and settling into a new and often alien environment. That’s not to say we don’t know about mental illness around the time of childbirth – we do and there are hundreds of experts, books and scientific articles available to help. But, if we think more carefully about mums experiencing mental illness around childbirth who have also been asylum seekers or refugees… there isn’t much information available at all.
Yet, we know that asylum seekers and refugees have really high rates of mental illness associated with childbirth, and we know they often can’t seek help.
This leaves us with a large unmet need – a population that need help but can’t access it and a profession that knows little about the population or how to reach them. So, what should we do to help? What can we do to help?
In research the first place to start is asking a good question.
In this instance we don’t even know the good questions to ask as most researchers in the UK are not asylum seekers or refugees, and even fewer are asylum seekers or refugees who’ve experienced what it is like to live with mental illness during pregnancy and motherhood.
To ask the good questions… we need to ask the right people: Asylum seekers and refugees who’ve experienced mental illness around the time of childbirth!
We teamed up with our brilliant experts by experience Wan and Raiza and our charity partners City of Sanctuary and the Leeds Refugee Forum to try to do this. The UPLIFT project and our Me&Ma social media channels are the end product!
We are looking to engage with as many asylum seekers and refugees who’ve experienced mental illness around the time of child birth as possible. Not only do we want to support them and provide them with potential resources for help, but we also want to learn from them. I want to know what questions the research world should be asking, to better understand how we can help.
I encourage anyone accessing this site and our social media pages [link here] to enjoy the content, to learn from it and feel supported by it.
I also want to encourage people to come to our workshops and share their stories and tell us how we can be better. Tell us what the good questions to ask are, so we can help provide a better future.