Low-income women

THE IMPACT OF MOTHERING ON THE MENTAL HEALTH OF LOW-INCOME WOMEN

The Women’s Mental Health Research Project is based in the Department of Psychology and funded by a SANPAD grant. This project, managed by , involves several honours, masters and doctoral students and, for the past five years, focused on research in the area of reproductive mental health and low-income rural women. The current main project is entitled “The impact of mothering on the mental health of low-income women: Implications for mental health care”. The goals of this study are to:

Determine the levels and kinds of distress that women experience during pregnancy, birth and early motherhood. There will be an emphasis on the specific ways in which psychological distress is experienced and articulated in this community of women.

Determine the ways in which low-income women cope with the stressors associated with the prepartum and postpartum period.

Explore the factors in the lives of these women that are related to their psychological distress and resilience. The effects of the socio-economic, cultural and political contexts as well as the ways in which individual women interpret such conditions and life events in personal ways will be explored.

Consider the usefulness and appropriateness of different kinds of mental health care to low-income women. These ideas will hopefully also be operationalized in a formal proposal for an intervention study for which international funding will be raised.

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