Page 11 - RPA Magazine December 2020

Can you tell us a about the organisation? What is PANDA and what is its purpose? PANDA stands for Perinatal Anxiety & Depression Australia. We were born just over 35 years ago at the kitchen table of two women who had themselves been experiencing vulnerability after the birth of their babies. From there PANDA grew. Initially, we were an organisation that was very much about bringing together experience, mutual self-help and peer- led groups, and community awareness. It wasn’t until 2010 that PANDA was funded by the Commonwealth government for our helpline, which is now a national mental health helpline. Since 2010, PANDA has grown as an organisation from strength to strength, delivering not only the national, free support line to any Australian that rings us, but also began delivering education and training funded by states and territories for health professionals to increase their awareness around perinatal mental illness, to build and develop community education campaigns and awareness. Since that time, we’ve also received expansion of funding, in 2017, for the helpline, to extend our hours ... which took us from 5pm \\\\\\\[closing\\\\\\\] to 7:30pm AEST \\\\\\\[opening at 9am\\\\\\\]. Our organisation is very much centred around lived experience, which is the heart of everything we do. We have 340 community champions currently, and they help us build and develop everything we do ... The mental health checklist that’s on our website was born two years ago, which more than 50,000 people have now completed. It was all designed by people with lived experience, alongside of us. So, we operate a pure collaboration model. And around that we now deliver solid mental health services, both through a clinical mental health model \\\\\\\[and\\\\\\\] a volunteer or peer-support model also. The organisation operates at a policy level also. We’re very keen to ensure that the voice of lived experience helps inform the way the health system evolves and matures. Our community champions have helped support the royal commission into mental health services in Victoria this year, and have taken part in advisory groups and submitted papers to those. We’ve also based our submission to the Productivity Commission using the voice of lived experience. We’re very much still an advocacy agency, but the predominant amount of activity that we’re funded for is our national helpline. Who is typically affected by perinatal mental health issues? Is there a difference in how this affects women versus men? Prior to Covid-19, within Australia approximately one in five mums was experiencing anxiety and/or depression. And we say ‘and/or’ because quite often they occur together. We also know that one in 10 dads experience anxiety and/or depression during the perinatal period. Interestingly though, because we rely heavily on screening within our service system to be able to capture that data, and we know there’s been a significant investment in this ... the hospital system is really well placed to currently undertake screening when mums’ deliver babies, \\\\\\\[but\\\\\\\] we also know that in Australia we don’t have a good mandatory screening program for dads. We don’t really have anything but ad-hoc and in-the-moment screening for men in the event that they’re showing signs or struggle. So, we could quite easily say that the one in 10 men that are affected may well be \\\\\\\[a case of\\\\\\\] under-reporting, because we’re just not screening as heavily. What has the impact of Covid-19 been on perinatal mental health? We’ve seen a doubling of people reaching out, or new callers reaching out, for support through PANDA’s helpline. We’ve had a significant overrun in the number of callers, which has been both a wonderful thing – that people know they can seek support from us – and a concerning one because it’s as a result of the increased stress and anxiety triggers that people are experiencing. In the early stages, in March, we knew that people were really struggling with existential concerns about the kind of world they were bringing their babies into, as they were seeing the pandemic roll across the world. Then, as Covid-19 started to occur within Australia, and services and supports were being shut down, people were becoming very disrupted from parenting groups and mums’ groups. They were being moved through the hospital system faster post-birth. They weren’t having as much time with the consultants in the hospital WHAT’S TRENDING 9 system, such as lactation consultants and health checks, and all of the wonderful midwife services that people get exposed to generally in birthing hospitals. And that was really having a significant impact on people. The rates of callers increased, our rates of service delivery also increased, but unfortunately, we struggled to cope with demand, so we had to rapidly adjust our model of delivery to ensure we were able to support people and manage risk and ensure that people were connected with appropriate local services. We also saw a change in the reasons why people were calling out to us. Where we were traditionally seeing people with mental vulnerability and the standard symptoms of anxiety and depression, what we really experienced as a result of Covid-19 was people reaching out who were ... affected by financial displacement or financial and housing displacement, being stood down from work roles ... We had women calling us with concerns because their husbands were working from home and they didn’t know how to manage what had been the safety and security of that time with just their baby, and now they were having to fit their partner into their world and they were getting stressed and anxious about that. We also saw a slight increase in the number of people reporting family or partner violence. And we had more men calling. Traditionally, the number of men who call our services has been quite low, and those men were generally calling historically about their \\\\\\\[concerns for their\\\\\\\] partner. We saw that change where men were calling about their own experience. What are the symptoms of perinatal mental health issues? How do they differ from more general stress and anxiety issues? This is where it becomes complicated, because there’s no doubt, for people that don’t have mental vulnerabilities, that parenting is still a struggle. That’s why at PANDA we always ask that if people feel that flag going off ... that something is wrong and the way in which they would normally be in the world, even though they have this new baby and there’s no normal, if any of that feels disrupted, we always say to people to reach out. Ultimately, we know that, generally, TO PAGE 10 RETAIL PHARMACY ASSISTANTS • DEC 2020