Mental health campaigner Lindsay Robinson receives MBE for supporting mothers in Northern Ireland, but vows to continue vital work

Mrs Robinson, wife of DUP leader Gavin, suffered severe depression while pregnant and after her son was born in 2013, and has since campaigned for better support for mothers in Northern Ireland.

She was recognised with an MBE for services to perinatal mental health in Northern Ireland after years of campaigning.

Mrs Robinson said it was “absolutely wonderful” to receive the honour from Princess Anne.

“Knowing that mums and their families in Northern Ireland now have schemes and specialist services is amazing,” she said.

She added that work to establish services for new mothers in Northern Ireland isn’t over yet, however.

She said: “We still don’t have a mum and baby unit in Northern Ireland, and I would be calling for that.”

As she has previously told the News Letter, Mrs Robinson got involved in campaigning to make “something good come out of something that was awful” after a lengthy battle with ante-natal and post-natal depression, which wasn’t diagnosed until her son was almost two years old.

"As I began to recover I began to understand what I'd been going through and why life had been so difficult,” she said.

"I realised that there was very little awareness, particularly for us mums, of perinatal mental health.

"At that stage in Northern Ireland there was a lack of services and places where mums and their families could find support."

She decided to share her experiences to help other mothers in the same situation, reaching out to other parents and “make sure other mums knew there was a name for what they were going through and that they weren't alone”.

She concluded that access to specialist perinatal services was the answer – but at the time, they didn’t exist in this part of the world.

"If I’d had access to specialist perinatal mental health services I think my story would have been completely different," she said.

"When I started out I didn't imagine I would be campaigning.

"At the start I just wanted to share a little bit of our experience and my story and raise some awareness. It is one of those things that sometimes you are just in the right place at the right time.

"I met lots of different people and became aware there was a need for this campaign and got quite involved. It all snowballed from there.

"It has been quite important for me because it has given purpose to that pain we went through. That was an awful, awful time.

"Even though it was very painful there was a purpose which came out of it.

In January 2021, following years of campaigning, then Health Minister Robin Swann announced funding for the development of new specialist perinatal mental health services for Northern Ireland.

Mrs Robinson said: "In each trust there is now a dedicated team, a multidisciplinary team.

"It is a whole specialist team there to support mum in the ante-natal period or the post-natal period, if she is having a struggle with her mental health.

"That has been lovely – to know something good has come out of something that was awful for me.