Category: Women's Health
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Sved Williams, A., Osborn, A., Yelland, C., & Hollamby, S. (2021). Changing intergenerational patterns of emotional dysregulation in families with perinatal borderline personality disorder. Archives of Women's Mental Health, 24(4), 641-648.
Aktar, E., Qu, J., Lawrence, P. J., Tollenaar, M. S., Elzinga, B. M., & Bögels, S. M. (2019). Fetal and infant outcomes in the offspring of parents with perinatal mental disorders: Earliest influences. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 10.
Howard, L. M., & Khalifeh, H. (2020). Perinatal mental health: a review of progress and challenges. World Psychiatry, 19(3), 313–327.
Samantha Hellberg, M.A. (she/her/hers)
PhD Candidate; Intern
UNC Chapel Hill; VA Puget Sound, Seattle
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Sheila Crowell, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
Associate Professor
The University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
Nicolette Molina, B.A. (she/her/hers)
The University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
Samantha Hellberg, M.A. (she/her/hers)
PhD Candidate; Intern
UNC Chapel Hill; VA Puget Sound, Seattle
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Arela Agako, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
McMaster University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Katie Bresky, LCSW, MSW (she/her/hers)
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Pilar Sanjuan, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
University of New Mexico, School of Medicine
Albuquerque, New Mexico
The COVID-19 pandemic brought light to an ongoing “crisis for perinatal mental health” (e.g., Osborne et al., 2021). Critically, perinatal mental health challenges represent the most common complication of pregnancy. Over the past 30 years, research has increasing focused on the mechanisms and treatment of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. Yet, the needs of high-risk perinatal individuals who present with diagnostic complexity and high acuity concerns–such as emotion dysregulation, suicidality, self-injury, and substance use–have been largely unmet by research and clinical interventions (Judd et al., 2018). Unfortunately, these individuals and their families are at particularly elevated risk for adverse outcomes, contributing to transgenerational cycles of trauma exposure and mental health challenges. This gap represents a critical issue for clinical care and public health.
Thus, this symposium will highlight recent efforts to advance our understanding and treatment of emotional dysregulation and risk behaviors in the perinatal period. The first presentation will illustrate how perinatal maternal borderline personality disorder symptoms and emotion dysregulation–when left unaddressed–exert transgenerational impacts on infants by influencing affective outcomes. The second presentation will overview findings from a scoping review on the implementation of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) during the perinatal period, highlighting significant gaps in our understanding of the feasibility, safety, and efficacy of treatments for emotion dysregulation and high acuity behavior during pregnancy and postpartum. Adaptations to address infant and familial risks will be highlighted, and limitations in our our understanding of both individual, infant, and familial treatment outcomes addressed. The third presentation will address two novel studies aimed to: 1) assess whether frontline, cognitive-behavioral treatments for perinatal mental health effectively target perinatal emotion dysregulation, and 2) develop a novel treatment protocol for perinatal emotion dysregulation to improve treatment outcomes and address limitations of existing approaches. The fourth presentation will build on this work by discussing the development, effectiveness, and implementation of a novel DBT-informed, strengths-based treatment designed specifically to address the needs of high-risk perinatal individuals and their families. The integration of evidence-based parenting interventions into the DBT model will be discussed. Our last presentation will overview the results of a pilot study that leveraged community-based partners to improve care for perinatal patients managing substance use disorders. This presentation will highlight the importance of integrating perinatal stakeholders–such as doulas–into efforts to improve perinatal outcomes and access to trauma-informed care. Finally, our expert discussant will highlight critical gaps in research, clinical care, and policy that need to be addressed to bolster resilience, mitigate risk, and improve the health and wellbeing of perinatal individuals and their families.
