The Urban Institute has released a new brief, Home Visiting and Maternal Depression: Seizing the Opportunities to Help Mothers and Young Children, which offers practical insights about how home visiting programs can better serve depressed mothers and their young children.
Depression, particularly among low‐income mothers, is widespread. Using home visiting programs to identify depressed mothers and connect them and their families to services is a promising approach to treat parental depression and address its negative effects early in a child’s life. In its brief, the Urban Institute has identified both challenges home visiting programs face in helping depressed mother and possible means to overcome those challenges. Six challenges included in the brief (in bold) and ways of addressing each challenge follow:
- Reaching mothers who most need help. As home visiting programs expand with Affordable Care Act (ACA) funding, communities can seize the opportunity to use community data to learn about and target services to depressed mothers of young children. Communities can also develop effective referral and recruitment paths that connect depressed mothers with home visiting and offer many such paths for mothers (enabling referral for mothers in different circumstances and with children of different ages).
- Helping home visitors identify depression and talk to mothers about its implications and treatment. Home visiting programs can consider depression screening as part of a comprehensive approach to engaging and helping depressed mothers. Program staff should know how identifying and treating a mother’s depression connects to the core home visiting mission and train home visitors should be trained to talk with mothers about these connections. Programs may also consider: training home visitors to speak honestly to a mother’s concerns about child protective services; complementing one‐on‐one attention during home visits with group or community strategies; and seeking out resources to help overcome some of the mothers’ practical barriers while also connecting mothers to depression treatment.
- Connecting to, supporting, and providing high‐quality treatment. Researchers are studying two promising approaches to this challenge: developing home‐based mental health services that partner with home visit programs and providing skilled mental health consultation and supervision. Programs should consider combining the two approaches to reach the most families.
- Attending to young children’s development as well as mothers’ treatment. Programs may consider close partnerships, multidisciplinary collaborative teams, and cross‐training to help children’s healthy growth and development.
- Offering ongoing help after home visiting. Having an explicit transition plan for mothers with depression leaving home visiting programs is crucial for continuing support.
