Mental Health & Trauma Support
Overview
Midwives often serve as primary caregivers during crises, which can expose them to high levels of trauma, stress, and emotional exhaustion. Additionally, communities affected by disasters and conflict face significant mental health challenges, requiring midwives to provide psychological first aid and emotional support alongside maternal care.
Key Risks and Challenges:
The Role of Midwives in Humanitarian Crises
Position statement on the role of midwives in humanitarian settings including recommendation for midwives’ associations to care for midwives and others who provide direct services by being aware of and respond to their mental health needs.
Interlocked: Midwives and the Climate Crisis
Interlocked: Midwives and the Climate Crisis highlights midwives as frontline responders to climate-related health threats. This report explores midwives’ experiences as trusted, community-based first responders as well as the (mental health) challenges midwives face due to climate disasters.
Pass the mic: Sara Jean, World Mental Health Day
A Haitian midwife living through crisis in Haiti shares her personal experience of being pregnant, providing care to others while fearing for her own safety, her baby, and her family. She reflects on midwives’ needs to be better prepared to support women’s and their own mental health.
Expert Resources
A short guide by the Red Cross and Red Crescent on how to provide Psychological First Aid – offering calm, compassionate support to people in distress during crises and emergencies.
This toolkit is a compilation of a range of several practice guidelines on Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) in humanitarian contexts, to enable easy access to key multi-lingual resources.
This WHO guide outlines how to integrate perinatal mental health into maternal and child health services, with evidence-based strategies and a case study from humanitarian settings.
This IAWG brief highlights perinatal mental health in emergencies, offering resources, service models, and a call to action to strengthen care and collaboration in humanitarian settings.
A digital service to improve mental health among pregnant women as well as among mothers and their partners low- and middle-income countries around the world.
A short mindfulness exercise from Belfast Health and Social Care Trust to help healthcare workers ground themselves and reduce stress before starting a shift.
