Melissa Bailey Photo
After Jo Lynn Wilson nearly lost her son in a shooting, she sought help for anxiety. Now she’s leading a new charge to help other moms cope with the stresses and sorrows of motherhood.
Wilson (pictured) is a community mental health ambassador for the New Haven Moms Partnership, which is just getting off the ground with a $2.5 million, five-year federal grant. She told her story at a press conference Friday morning at the community room of the Quinnipiac Terrace housing projects.
The program, the first of its kind in the state, is a joint effort of the city, the Yale Department of Psychiatry and moms like Wilson to tackle mental health concerns among mothers. Moms will come together for workshops and therapeutic groups for those who suffer from depression.
Wilson, a mother of six who lives in the West River neighborhood, joined the effort in December 2010 in the pre-planning stage of the program.
She had just suffered a major shock: Her 17-year-old son suffered serious injuries in a shooting on June 15 of that year. One of the bullets left him blind in one eye.
After the shooting, Wilson suffered from anxiety about her son’s safety as he learned to live life with one eye. She said she wasn’t afraid to seek help from mental health professionals. She emerged with a powerful message to share with other moms: “It’s OK to seek that help before you go into that downward spiral.”
She took that message to the streets last year, when she set out to interview other moms as part of planning for the program. She slipped a handbag full of questionnaires on her shoulder and set out to find moms who were disconnected from mental health services and who might need help.
Wilson set out into parks, hair salons, daycares — “anywhere I could see a woman.” She interviewed over 200 women about their needs and the stresses in their lives. Along the way, she found herself sharing her story and hearing stories from many others.
One 21-year-old woman confessed that she couldn’t go to school because she was afraid to leave her baby with her grandmother, who was hooked on drugs. Another said she had to sell her food stamps to pay the electricity bill.
Those conversations formed the basis of the research for the program. In total, 513 women were interviewed, according to Megan Veneema Smith, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale and the principal investigator on the grant. (She’s pictured hugging U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro.) They said they needed places close to where they worked, lived and interacted with their children to offer mental health support.
The New Haven Mental Health Outreach for Mothers, or MOMS Partnership for short, responded swiftly to those needs last year, setting up “empowerment groups” where women come together to share stories and take part in workshops on topics like finance literacy and Zumba. The program is a collaboration between Clifford Beers Child Guidance Clinic, New Haven Healthy Start, New Haven Health Department, All Our Kin, The Diaper Bank, the state Department of Children and Families, and the city housing authority.
Wilson, who was trained in mental health outreach, has served as a facilitator in the empowerment groups.
Now, with a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Office of Women’s Health, the program will expand to give therapeutic care to women struggling with depression. The money will pay for clinicians to run cognitive behavioral therapy groups in community rooms at public housing projects like Quinnipiac Terrace. It will also pay a part-time salary to Wilson and another ambassador to continue to facilitate the empowerment groups. The money will also fund a social marketing campaign designed to undo a stigma that prevents some mothers from seeking help.
Low-income minority women are at the highest risk for mental illness and are the least likely to get treatment, said Smith. Factors that put them at risk include caregiving, poverty and vulnerability to sexual abuse.
Smith said the Moms Partnership aims to reduce the stresses in women’s lives through group therapy.
Smith thanked U.S. Rep. DeLauro, the “legislative champion” who helped secure the grant to make that happen.
DeLauro (pictured) rattled off some reasons that women need the help: 20 to 30 percent of women are depressed during pregnancy and motherhood. They’re two times more likely to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety as well as trauma-related illness. Women with post-traumatic stress disorder “suffer longer and more severely than men.”
Women are the “most economically marginal” of the two genders — 84 percent of the public sector jobs that were shed in the economic downturn were held by women, she said.
“One in five kids go to bed hungry,” DeLauro continued with characteristic emphatic hand gestures. “Do you think that doesn’t worry the mother?”
She said she hopes the program will “disrupt the transmission of mental health problems from mothers to children.” Women are “the glue that keeps a family together,” she said. “It is our responsibility to give them the strength” and resources they need.