Today, the 10th of October, is the International Day of Mental Health. A day extremely important and meaningful, since the last 2 years our mental health gets challenged daily. We want to take this opportunity to speak up about Midwives’ mental health status and how fragile it is nowadays.
Midwives are the people that are there. All the time, every day, at any time and any moment. They are the people that you should feel comfortable calling in the middle of the night and be sure they will show up immediately. They are not your mum, they are not your brother, they are not your friend. They are not related to you at all, but you can be sure that they will prioritize you, they will pause their personal life and they will serve your needs.
Darryl*, a father whose daughter was birthed with the help of an incredible Midwife, said to me when I told him I am a student Midwife:
“You’re gonna be a Midwife? Oh god, I admire your job. My ex-wife wanted to birth with her own Midwife and the experience was incredible! Our birth didn’t really go as planned, but if it wasn’t for her we wouldn’t have our daughter now. I was amazed at how she totally ignored her needs in order to help my daughter’s mother. I wasn’t fully aware of what exactly was happening at the moment, I realized it when I hugged my daughter, but that Midwife is in my heart! She fu***ng made it happen!”
This is currently the life of a Midwife. But how mentally easy or healthy is this life? What are the challenges of this job?
What Darryl saw as a miracle is a Midwife’s everyday life. Midwives pause their lives in order to support people and this comes with a price. They have to always be available. They have to miss parties, they have to skip meals, they have to miss their kids’ theater plays, they have to leave their partners alone on difficult nights. And all those things cost. They cost them guilt, they cost them tears, they cost them disappointed children, they even cost them friends and partners sometimes. The psychological burden is huge. Balancing work and personal life is not easy, but for them it is even more difficult.
And then here comes the trauma. Whoever thinks missing a patient is traumatic, try understanding how traumatic can it be if this patient is a newborn baby, if this patient is a pregnant person ready to hold their baby in their arms. If with this loss a newborn child misses their parent, if with this loss the partner has to deal with both grief and parenthood. Imagine if there is no partner and this baby is now alone in a world that is not very friendly. Or worse, imagine if you are a Midwife and you lose both (or more in case of multiple pregnancies). This can easily be a Midwife’s trauma too. And it adds up, because it usually does not only happen once in your life. And do not get me wrong, I am not saying there are no midwives with 0% rates of loss, but I am talking about the average.
In addition to all those mental burdens comes the internal field’s pressure too. The quality of a Midwife’s work is under inspection every day, because Midwifery is trying to prove itself as a science. The role of midwives was suppressed in modern hospitals of the last centuries. And now that they try to shine bright again, they are treated as incompetent kitchen ladies (because there is the prejudice that only women become midwives) that want to farce themselves over the “real scientists”. Thank god many people do not think like that nowadays, but those that do make our job harder, especially for hospital Midwives.
Conclusion
So yes, midwives can suffer from anxiety, burnouts, panic attacks, insomnia, and even develop physical symptoms and disorders as part of the psychosomatic expression. But for so many probably even uncountable reasons Midwifery is still the best career path I could ever choose.
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The “Being a Midwife” team