When a new mom sits across from me, vibrating with anxiety and certain that she alone is uniquely ill-equipped to parent, one of the first things I tell her, as a clinical psychologist specializing in treating perinatal mental-health disorders, is that she is in good company. A startling 20 percent of new mothers experience clinically significant levels of anxiety during pregnancy and the first year postpartum, and research indicates that the prevalence of perinatal anxiety is only increasing. Being a psychologist requires holding on to hope when your patients have none and metabolizing distress with a belief that, just as the moral arc of the universe is supposed to bend toward justice, we as a society will get better at caring for each other. But being an anxious mother in America seems overwhelmingly, uniquely bleak right now, with no hope of improvement.
