Why the US Should Have Mother-Baby Units

When a mother gives birth, we tell her to go to a hospital. It is the safest place for both her and her baby during labor and delivery. But when a mother in the United States gives birth and then develops a postpartum psychiatric illness — including postpartum psychosis — she is hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. Away from her newborn. Alone.

I know this because it happened to me.

After my son was born, what followed was not immediate clarity — it was a series of missed signals and misdiagnoses by the healthcare professionals who should have recognized what was happening. By the time I was finally taken to a psychiatric hospital, precious time had already been lost. I had no idea what was happening to me. Waking up in that ward was terrifying — but the hardest part, without question, was not the illness itself. It was being separated from my son. Not being allowed to hold him, feed him, or simply be near him during the most vulnerable weeks of both our lives.

My hospitalization was medically necessary. My separation from my son was the consequence of a healthcare system that had no “Mother-Baby Unit” where we could receive care together.

Research is clear about what happens when mothers and newborns are separated in the immediate postpartum period. Those first days and weeks are among the most sensitive in a child's neurological and emotional development. Separation triggers measurable stress responses in infants — increased crying, altered neurobehavioral development — and reduces maternal confidence in ways that can persist for weeks. Breastfeeding, already fragile in the early postpartum period, is significantly disrupted by prolonged separation.

Most of these effects are not permanent. Attachment disruptions typically resolve by the end of the first year. But "not permanent" is not the same as "without cost." Those early weeks shape a child's stress regulation and emotional development in ways that echo into adulthood. And for a mother already navigating a psychiatric crisis, losing those weeks compounds an already devastating experience.

There is another reason Mother-Baby Units matter that is rarely discussed.

Many of the mothers who develop postpartum psychosis have never experienced a mental illness before in their lives. They have no frame of reference for what is happening to them. They did not grow up navigating psychiatric care. They did not choose this. And yet in the United States, they wake up — or come back to themselves — in a general psychiatric hospital, surrounded by patients with vastly different needs, in an environment that was never designed for a woman who just gave birth.

A general psychiatric ward is not a place to recover from having a baby. The sounds, the setting, the distance from your newborn, the absence of the softness that new motherhood is supposed to hold — all of it compounds an already devastating experience.

For me, the effects of that environment did not end when I was discharged. They followed me home. The trauma of waking up in a psychiatric hospital days after giving birth — confused, separated from my son, with no understanding of what had happened — contributed to a diagnosis of complex PTSD.

I am not writing this a year or two after my experience with postpartum psychosis. I am writing it six years later. And I still have to manage complex PTSD from a situation that would not have happened if the United States held the same standard of care for mothers experiencing psychiatric emergencies as the United Kingdom does.

That is not a small thing. That is a life-long consequence of a preventable gap in our healthcare system.

This is precisely why modern healthcare guidelines increasingly emphasize keeping mothers and babies together even in medically complex situations. When separation is unavoidable, the research is unambiguous: minimizing it and restoring contact as quickly as possible is not a preference. It is a clinical imperative.

In the United States, that imperative is routinely ignored.

In the United Kingdom, Mother-Baby Units exist specifically to address this gap. These are specialized inpatient psychiatric facilities where mothers experiencing postpartum illness — including postpartum psychosis — are admitted alongside their newborns. They receive psychiatric treatment while remaining with their babies, preserving those irreplaceable early weeks of bonding whenever possible. There are currently twenty-two such units across the UK.

There are none in the United States.

American mothers experiencing postpartum psychiatric emergencies deserve the same level of care. They deserve to be treated without being separated from their newborns. They deserve Mother-Baby Units — not as a luxury, but as a standard of care that the evidence has supported for decades.

I lost thirty days with my son. Those thirty days were not inevitable. They were the result of a gap in our healthcare system that we have the knowledge, the evidence, and the resources to close.

It is time to close it.

Learn More

To learn more about Mother-Baby Units and how they work in the United Kingdom, visit the Royal College of Psychiatrists' guide to Mother and Baby Units.