Professor Julie Jomeen is not just an academic expert when it comes to the mental health and well-being of new parents.
The executive dean of the Southern Cross University School of Health spent years working as a midwife in the UK, beginning in her 20s, and also has two children of her own.
“It is such a precious and privileged profession, to be there at that moment. It’s not just about caring for women who give birth. It is about taking care of the woman during pregnancy and after.
“There is nothing more special than being in a room with a woman giving birth and a partner or husband is there. They are so excited about the arrival of this baby, she is a wanted baby and the whole feeling is a real privilege.”
She still remembers the first time she witnessed a live birth: “I cried, I was so emotional, all the emotion of the experience, the emotion of the parents, the way the midwife was and how she interacted and worked with that couple. .
“It was really a very emotional moment for me and I think I then thought that this is a job that I would really like to do. I’m a pretty emotional person anyway, so I’m pretty moved by things. “You feel like ‘Should I be a little more professional?’ – but that inability to not be able not to cry was really very special.”
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The mother of two’s own experience of childbirth and motherhood has had its ups and downs and downs: “I had a baby that died. I had a little girl and then a second girl born at 28 weeks who did not survive. Then I went ahead and had my son. Having that experience definitely changed me. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through.”
She found it difficult to be a midwife again: “It was very difficult to be in that environment where people were excited and happy. I went back to work. (But) that absolutely gave me a different perspective on how to care for those people who don’t do well.”
Ms Jomeen said that people don’t have to go through childbirth to be a good midwife: “But obviously when you’ve been through something you have a different perspective.
“You probably can’t describe labor pain until you’ve actually been through it. You can’t describe how it feels when the baby emerges until you’ve actually been through it, though you can appreciate what it might be like.
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“That makes a difference, without a doubt the most difficult personal experience I’ve ever had.”
She also informed her decision to embark on the study of mental well-being during pregnancy and childbirth for the past 20 years, which led her to the Gold Coast and SCU, sponsor of the Entrepreneurs category in Gold Coast Bulletin Women of the Year by Harvey Norman .
She took up the role of SCU in 2020, having previously been Dean of Health at the University of Hull in the UK.
Ms. Jomeen has a long list of research credits, writing an award-winning book Choice, Control and Contemporary Childbirth that linked perinatal women’s choice and decision-making with psychological health outcomes.
“I guess what my work has taught me over the last 20 years is that we have to be able to recognize in women during labor that it’s an emotionally labile period and evoke reactions that are normal. But there will also be a proportion of women for whom, for whatever reason, childbirth is a great psychological challenge.
“People come into pregnancy and childbirth with all kinds of backgrounds, including a history of mental health issues. And while we need to make sure we have support services in place for people who need them at the right time, we also need to make sure we don’t overly pathologize mental health. So we almost say that anyone who feels a little bit, you know, depressed, has a mental health problem, because that’s a normal life cycle. Pregnancy is an intense, time-limited, and really focused experience. So you get that concentration of emotional lability at all times.”
And then there may be a stressful sequel that is just as important.
“When everything goes well, in a motherhood context, it’s great, but things don’t always.
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“There will always be births that you will remember, because they were just phenomenal. And then there will be births that you remember because things didn’t go as planned, you had to support women in a very different way, and that would include babies that are born with problems or babies that are not born alive. That is also part of maternity care.
“How then does one support a woman, a couple, a family, in that context that is confronting us all. Of course, you face nursing death all the time and serious illnesses. But people don’t expect it in a maternity care setting.
“We have reached a point where technology and health care are so advanced that people believe that everything can be solved and everything can be managed. Actually, there is still the hand of God or whatever it is that plays the part of it. Not everything can be managed, repaired and predicted.
“There’s a context that you have to deal with there, where people are so completely shocked that they haven’t come to a successful conclusion.”
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