Barriers to Accessing Perinatal Mental Health Services

The author of this thesis has a specialist interest in perinatal mental health difficulties and postpartum psychosis. The author observed inequalities in clinical service access for minority groups, such as language barriers and cultural insensitivity. These observations led to the development of the literature review and further investigation in the form of the empirical paper.
Paper one presents a literature review which compares and contrasts the barriers to accessing services for women with perinatal mental health difficulties with a specific focus on literature that considers the experiences of women from White British backgrounds and Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME backgrounds). The author brought together relevant literature from the two recently published literature reviews and searched for new literature, including grey literature. The findings highlighted similarities in the barriers to accessing services for the two groups alongside additional barriers and such as defining symptomology, communication with professionals and practical barriers.
Paper two presents the findings of the empirical paper, which considered the barriers to accessing services for five women from BAME backgrounds that have experienced postpartum psychosis aged between 21 and 35 years old. Mental health difficulties, such as PP pose huge risks to mother and baby, and it is known that fewer women from BAME backgrounds access timely support for such difficulties (NHS, 2019). Murray’s Narrative Framework (2000; 2008) was used to analyse the data and the researcher considered the findings through four lenses: the personal, interpersonal, positional and ideological. The barriers and facilitators to accessing services are discussed in relation to these four lenses.
Paper three is an executive summary that presents the findings of the empirical paper in a concise and accessible format. This paper is aimed at any person with interest in postpartum psychosis or lived experience of mental health difficulties. This paper is to be distributed by Action on Postpartum Psychosis in both paper and online format.