Guest Post: My experience of perinatal and postnatal OCD

Today is #TimeToTalk day, a day all about increasing mental health awareness by talking about it and perhaps reaching out to someone with mental health issues to make sure they’re doing okay. Here I have a guest post from a close friend of mine who had her daughter 7 weeks before I gave birth to AutumnĀ and has unfortunately been suffering from OCD since during pregnancy. I’ll be posting about mental health quite a lot on my blog, so I thought it would be interesting to ask her to write a post for me about her experiences so I could find out more about what she’s been going through but also to spread awareness of perinatal and postnatal OCD.

Please be aware that as with lots of things regarding mental health, this may be triggering.

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Children’s health and poverty in the UK

As both a mother and Social Sciences student, I have found the State of Child Health Report 2017, which was published today, concerning. Poverty in the UK and how it affects the issue of children’s health is something I have been studying this academic year and found very interesting.

Although it’s encouraging to read that we are better than the US, how and why is it that we are worse than a lot of other European countries? We have the fifth highest rate of infant mortality in Europe which is extremely worrying and this is much higher in deprived socio-economic groups. As I glance at Autumn asleep peacefully next to me, I feel quite angry that not more is being done to prevent these small, beautiful, innocent babies from dying.

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