STAMPP Grant: Leading Community-wide Care for Mothers & Babies

RMHS Early Childhood Team hosted a Rutland Area Climb Out of Darkness walk to raise awareness and funds for perinatal mental health support in the Rutland Area.

Scan here to learn more about the STAMPP grant and perinatal mental health.

For new and expecting parents, the perinatal period can be a time of great joy and positive expectations. But for many, it can bring dramatic mood changes and other mental health challenges. Depression and anxiety are among the most common complications related to pregnancy, affecting some 1 in 7 childbearing women. Additionally, around 1 in 10 men experience paternal postpartum depression. Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders, or PMADs, is the term used to describe these feelings of distress, and it is the focus of a five-year STAMPP grant awarded to CCN’s Early Childhood Mental Health team.

A program of the Vermont Department of Health and Department of Mental Health, STAMPP is an acronym for Screening, Treatment, and Access for Mothers and Perinatal Partners. The overarching goal of the program and its federally-funded grant is to improve the mental health and well-being of pregnant and postpartum women and their partners through increased access to treatment and recovery support services. The grant has enabled CCN’s Early Childhood Services team to establish and pilot a broad portfolio of new programs, resources, and therapy groups for new and expecting parents in Rutland County.

Lauren Norford is the Manager of Early Childhood Services. She explains how her agency took a collaborative approach with this grant. “Some designated agencies used the grant to fund internal programming, but we have been spreading it out throughout the county to other providers. We decided to train as many people as we could to be able to understand more about perinatal depression, and know how to refer parents to receive proper support.”

Online training was offered through an organization called Postpartum Support International and involved a 2-day curriculum designed for a broad range of professionals including doctors, nurses, nurse managers, social workers and mental health providers. In addition

to Rutland Mental Health Services staff, participants included representatives from Rutland Regional Medical Center, Rutland Women’s Health, Rutland County Head Start, VNAHSR, Community Health Centers, and the Rutland office of the Department of Health, as well as a number of clinicians in private practice, and the director of Wonderfeet Kids’ Museum. So far, 45 people have received training.

“What’s nice about having all these community partners trained, is that everyone’s got a common language, and we’re kind of rowing together on improving access for parents in Rutland County.”

The Mothers and Babies Program is one of the largest collaborations to come out of this community-wide training. Mothers and Babies is an evidence-based program for pregnant women and new parents to help manage stress and prevent postpartum depression, and it is accessible through five different agencies in Rutland County, including Children’s Integrated Services, Visiting Nurse Association and Hospice of the Southwest Region, and Rutland County Head Start. A dropin support group led by trained M&B facilitators meets weekly at Wonderfeet Kids’ Museum.

The Circle of Security Parenting group is another evidence-based intervention, provided by Lauren’s Early Childhood team. These support groups focus on a number of responsive parenting themes, including the importance of infant attachment as a protection against postpartum depression.

“The overall goal was to come up with a menu of services, so that a person who was experiencing any kind of distress in the perinatal period could find something that could be supportive,” says Lauren. Currently, that menu includes everything from community-based support groups and peer mentoring, like Mothers and Babies, to more specialized treatment options and 1:1 counseling through the RMHS Adult Outpatient department.

“The other really positive outcome of this grant is the way we have built a close working relationship between our Early Childhood and our Adult Outpatient teams,” says Lauren. “These were two teams that were never tied together before. We have worked really closely together, particularly during the pandemic, around getting services to parents, and now several of our staff in Adult Outpatient have received training in perinatal mental health.”

Lori Brown-Stone is one of the RMHS Adult Outpatient clinicians who received specialized training in therapies including Mothers and Babies, Grief and Loss for Maternal Mental Health, and EMDR Trauma Treatment for Maternal Mental Health. She uses the Mothers and Babies curriculum as the basis for her Mom’s Therapy Group, for mothers experiencing postpartum depression and anxiety.

Prior to this grant, says Lauren, there were very few resources in Rutland County supporting perinatal mental health. Now in year four, the program is reaching its stride, and still expanding. Coming soon: a peer mentoring program, along with a support group for parents experiencing grief and loss in relation to pregnancy and infancy.

“We are right on the cusp of being known for all of the things we offer. Our new brochure is being sent home with every new baby from the hospital, and that’s really exciting. We want parents to know that mental health and wellbeing during pregnancy is just as important as physical health. It would be wonderful if every new parent got to do Mothers and Babies, as a matter of course.”