New Parents Face Perinatal Anxiety as Clinics Open Across Australia

Chenzi Dong, a Melbourne lawyer who migrated from China, gave birth to a baby boy last year and found herself struggling with intense anxiety. "At times, I felt desperate," she said. " She added that family attention focused almost entirely on the child, leaving her emotions unaddressed.

Abc reported that research from Perinatal Anxiety and Depression Australia shows about one in five women and one in 10 expecting or new fathers in Australia experience depression or anxiety during the perinatal period. A Gidget Foundation Australia survey completed last year found that 25 per cent of new parents in Victoria were unsure how to access professional support and 33 per cent believed their symptoms were not severe enough to warrant help.

More than half of surveyed parents from culturally and linguistically diverse communities held the same view.

The federal government has funded dozens of Gidget Foundation Australia Perinatal Mental Health Centres. New clinics opened this month in Berry Springs in the Northern Territory and Launceston in Tasmania. Additional sites were established earlier this year in Clayton in Melbourne's south-east and Fairfield in Sydney's west, with further centres announced for Hume and Casey in Melbourne.

Sydney mother Cathy Ngo, a Gidget Foundation ambassador, sought professional help only when her son turned one. "My heritage is Vietnamese. In my culture, we don't really talk about our feelings or what we're going through," she said.

Ngo described the free services as "absolutely a relief" and urged others to seek support promptly. Jane Fisher, director of Global and Women's Health at Monash University's School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, noted that parents from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds often lack family support from their home countries and face language barriers.