News Letter features editor Helen McGurk shares her heartbreaking personal experience of why Northern Ireland needs a specialist inpatient psychiatric mother and baby unit now

Each woman in the room had been through the unimaginable trauma of being hospitalised, either during or after their pregnancy, due to a serious, sometimes life-threatening, mental health crisis, such as antenatal or postnatal depression or postpartum psychosis – where the mother experiences hallucinations, delusions and/or mania.

What compounded that crisis was the lack of specialist psychiatric in-patient facilities for mothers in Northern Ireland, or indeed Ireland. Instead of a dedicated facility, women were placed on general psychiatric wards without their babies, or treated at a specialist facility in the UK with their babies, but hundreds of miles from home.

Despite the re-traumatising pain of sharing our experiences, we had gathered together, along with consultant psychiatrist Dr Janine Lynch, to petition Mrs Robinson for the establishment of an in-patient psychiatric mother and baby facility in Northern Ireland. Like I said, that was nearly two decades ago.

However, as a BBC Spotlight programme revealed this week, NI women experiencing perinatal (the time when pregnancy begins to the first year after the baby is born) mental health issues are still in the same position as I, and many others were, all those years ago.

My daughter will be 18 in November. When I was six months pregnant with her I developed clinical depression, and soon became suicidal. Not just ‘down in the dumps’ as one male doctor diagnosed it, but a deep and terrifying depression where I saw no future. I couldn’t sleep or eat, the weight dropped off – my pre-pregnancy size 10 jeans swamped me. I couldn’t get out of bed, shower, let alone start planning for the imminent arrival of a baby.

I was wracked by guilt and shame. There were lots of women who were desperate to have children and couldn’t. Impending motherhood was meant to be a happy time, a wonderful life-changing event, not a time to be consumed with suicidal thoughts. Almost overnight I became a statistic, the one in 10 women who suffers antenatal depression – depression which occurs during pregnancy. Of course, I was too far gone to realise what was wrong with me. Following a spate of terrifying panic attacks and some very dark thoughts, I went to an out-of-hours doctor. He quickly dismissed them and said I couldn’t take any medication since I was pregnant (that advice was totally inaccurate). Instead, he told me to go home and have a cup of coffee with lots of milk! Eventually, as the depression got worse, I saw a more sympathetic female doctor.

Before prescribing anti-depressants, she told me about the risks and benefits of taking medication during pregnancy, but in the end we decided this was the best option. Also, because I was suicidal, it was decided I needed to be admitted to a psychiatric unit. I spent the first week of my hospitalisation on a general psychiatric ward in Windsor House at Belfast City Hospital. Windsor House was a grim, grey building; Dickensian and decaying; it was the scary mental asylum of my imagination. Thankfully it closed some years ago. On arrival I was sent to a tiny, joyless, square room to await the consultant psychiatrist. It had a table, two plastic chairs, no curtains, a stained carpet and harsh overhead lighting; not unlike a police interview room. After an interminable four hours the psychiatrist arrived and following two hours of questioning at 1am I was finally taken to the ward by a disinterested nurse, unmoved by my obvious distress. Windsor House had a lounge area, which I avoided because it was open to the mentally ill men from the adjoining ward. Some of the patients displayed violent and volatile behaviour. It was a wholly inappropriate and scary place for a pregnant woman to be. Luckily after a week I was transferred to a female-only ward at Knockbracken Healthcare Park, but it wasn’t a specialist maternal mental health facility. A new mum who had severe postnatal depression was being treated on her own, without her baby. Her husband would visit with the infant, then leave again. She was broken. It was harrowing to observe.

I took the medication and began to improve in tiny steps. However, the fallout from depression lingers long after the so-called ‘black dog’ has retreated.

Unbelievably, nearly two decades on and despite the campaigning by many courageous women, and fantastic consultant psychiatrists over the years, the situation for maternal mental health in 2025 remains the same as it did all those years ago. It breaks my heart.

In November 2023, the Department of Health confirmed that Belfast City Hospital had been chosen as the location for a new mother and baby unit, however, funding has still not been found. Why not?

It is simply not good enough to shove women with perinatal mental health issues on to general psychiatric wards, because there is no where else to put them. This cannot continue. We need a specialist unit, where women and their babies get appropriate care and attention.

It is, without exaggeration, a matter of life and death.

*If you are in crisis contact Lifeline, a free, confidential telephone helpline on 0808 808 8000