After losing their first child, this couple struggled to find public mental health support
Their hearts were bursting, then left broken.
In 2022, Stephanie Goulding had a picture-perfect pregnancy with her husband, Chris, but the birth was anything but.
After labouring for three hours and a failed forceps delivery, she had an emergency C-section — but when the couple’s daughter, Macy, was born, they almost didn’t realize it.
“We didn’t hear a baby cry. We didn’t hear any of the things that we knew we should be hearing, and basically Macy was whisked away,” she told CBC News in a recent interview.
The Gouldings didn’t see their baby for hours.
“They stapled Steph back together, they finished the C-section. They put us in recovery,” said Chris Goulding. “We had no idea what was happening.”
Eventually, a doctor told the first-time parents their baby was sick.
“We didn’t know what ‘sick’ meant. I said to him, ‘sick’ was a broad term,” he said.
In this case, it meant Macy lost her heartbeat for 10 minutes after she was born.
Macy was brain-dead. Ten hours after the Gouldings welcomed their first child into the world, they had to say goodbye.
But the couple’s trauma didn’t end at the loss of their child.
Surrounded by happy families
While Stephanie Goulding recovered at the hospital, she was placed in the maternity ward, where she was surrounded by happy new families.
“Every new family walked right by our door,” she said.
On the Gouldings’ door was a butterfly — a signal to nurses they’d suffered a loss.
When Stephanie and Chris Goulding lost their first child after what seemed to be a picture-perfect pregnancy, they learned directly about a lack of perinatal supports for parents dealing with a crisis. Jenna Head has this feature report.
When she was discharged, they were sent home with pamphlets about grief counselling at the hospital’s chapel. They went to a couple of sessions but needed something more, so Stephanie Goulding was referred to the province’s only perinatal psychiatrist, Dr. Archana Vidyasankar, but she was on a waitlist for eight weeks to receive monthly sessions.
“I spent eight weeks basically unable to get out of bed, just waiting to see if there was someone out there that could help me the way I needed to be helped,” she said. Vidyansakar was wonderful, Goulding said, but they needed sessions more than just a monthly session.
Vidyasankar runs a private practice in St. John’s called Prakash Pathways, which focuses on mental health during the perinatal period — defined as the time from pregnancy through a year or two after birth.
She receives over two dozen monthly referrals from Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services.
“There’s large gaps in terms of overall asking of how we’re doing in pregnancy and postpartum in terms of mental health, and then if we do, we’re challenged with where to go and where the services are after that,” Vidyasankar told CBC News.
The Gouldings, who opted for private counselling, want to see the provincial government step up its publicly offered perinatal mental health support.
“Not everybody is lucky enough to be able to go private,” Stephanie Goulding said. There are many people in the province who need it, added her husband.
“There’s families that are trying for years to have a child and can’t take advantage of it,” Chris Goulding said.
‘You never get over it’
According to Vidyasankar, 28 per cent of women in the province — among the highest rates in Canada — experience perinatal mood and anxiety problems.
She said the health-care system is missing a lot of psychological support and peer-to-peer support, while privately offered services often come with a price tag that isn’t accessible for all.
Dr. Kristen Newman, an in-patient psychologist for Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services’ women’s health program, says they’d like to expand their outpatient services.
“I think that that’s definitely something that, you know, needs to be worked on,” Newman told CBC News. “It is hard to have a baby, and it is a complete shift in your life.”
Perinatal mental health also affects more than the person giving birth, she said.
“We’ve been more inclusive of trans and non-binary parents as well, more inclusive of dads, biological fathers and partners because perinatal mental health does affect the partner as well.”
The Gouldings welcomed the arrival of their son Walker in 2023.
Stephanie Goulding said people often mistakenly believe the couple is over the loss of their first child because they have a beautiful little boy who keeps them busy.
“The truth is, like, we’re never going to be fully OK,” she said. “Once you have a loss like we’ve had, you never get over it. You never do in a million years.”
Macy comes to mind every day, say the couple — they wonder who she would’ve been, what her personality would have been like, and whether she would have looked like Walker.
And the Gouldings said Walker will always know he had a big sister.
“There’s not a moment that he’ll ask about her where we won’t tell him whatever he wants to know in the 10 short hours that we had with her,” they said.
Talking about challenges is important, says counsellor
Karen Clarke, who operates Open Book Doula and Counselling Services in Mount Pearl, lists her credentials as trained social worker, counsellor and doula — but most important, she said, she’s a mom.
But before having her son six years ago, Clarke and her husband experienced a miscarriage, and she says parents don’t get enough support and opportunities to reach out for help.
“Life as a mom is beautiful and wonderful and the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and that’s the thing, the hardest things in life are often the most beautiful parts of life,” Clarke said.
Her experience in early motherhood is what led her to opening her practice. Parents lack opportunities to talk about their challenges, she said.
“A lot of us go through our experience in parenthood believing that it’s only OK to talk about the positive thoughts, positive feelings and the positive experiences. And boy, there’s a lot of those to talk about, right? But just like everything in life, nothing is only positive,” Clarke said.
Her practice exclusively supports parents and soon-to-be parents, many of them in the perinatal period, which for Clarke includes the preconception phase before pregnancy and then up to the baby’s third birthday.
“The perinatal period is a time of major life transition for the entire family,” she said.
She sees clients six days a week and wants the province to improve its perinatal mental health services. For Clarke, it starts with education and preventive-care options. Educating parents about birth trauma will reduce their chances of experiencing it.
“If we are saying that we care deeply about infant and child mental health and well-being, then that means we have to care deeply about parental well-being.”
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