What Can Stillbirth Do A Parent’s Mental Health: Things Nobody Will Talk About

Pregnancy loss Stillbirth can be a devastating experience for parents. As per UNICEF, one stillbirth happens every 16 seconds. A stillbirth is the death or loss of a baby before or during the delivery. While there has been a lot of conversation about mental conditions affecting mothers like postpartum depression but not much has been spoken about the psychological aftermath of a stillbirth. Any form of pregnancy loss can induce a long period of emotional distress. Just as an expecting mother, the male parent too can experience a wide range of disturbing emotions including grief, pain, anger, stigma and others.Can I call myself a parent? It's not hard to imagine parents who are all set to welcome a new life. Expecting mothers are always surrounded by relatives and friends, being the centre of attention at every event they go to. Many times, those same parents are suddenly abandoned and forgotten by the people around them following a stillbirth. Such parents at subconscious thought might feel that their identity as a parent has not been accepted by society. They might feel differently from other parents who might have lost their children only after spending some life with them.My baby was a life for a fraction of time Another disturbing feeling that parents who suffered stillbirth might experience is the desire to have their baby acknowledged as a living being. They might have an innate desire to have their babies treated in the same way any other living child would have been treated. While for the world around them, the loss would not be more than a tissue loss but for these parents, something as simple as a death certificate of the lost baby would be priceless as it would validate its existence.Was I not competent enough? Some parents might feel incompetent in giving birth to a child. Some mothers might feel challenged by the loss and might develop an impulsive desire to prove their reproductive competency. This desire can be overwhelming and they might exhaust themselves thinking about the next pregnancy. Others will have a contrary feeling to this. Some mothers might develop an aversion to intimacy where they might deliberately avoid any intimate experience with their partner and delay conception in fear of getting a similar outcome.Searching remnants of parental pride These bereaved parents who never even got to spend a few moments with their child might often feel less than parents. Any object, thing or feeling that can make them feel like parents, for instance, the memory of labour or holding the deceased baby in their hands will give develop in them a sentiment of parental pride. They might, again and again, go through these memories to remind themselves that they were parents for a short while.