Mental Health Care for NICU Families 

Hearing that your unborn child has a serious health condition that requires intensive care often comes as a shock. Many parents find a NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) admission to be a stressful and sometimes traumatic experience. Parents may develop symptoms of depression, anxiety, or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Stanford Medicine Children’s Health’s NICU has been a pioneer in researching ways to support the mental health of NICU parents.

For some parents, these experiences can trigger feelings of grief, worry, and loss. These symptoms may have a profound and long-lasting effect on parents. Our NICU at Stanford Children’s Health is staffed by a mental health team that can provide a continuum of mental health services to help you cope. Our care starts after your child is diagnosed and continues through your child’s NICU stay.

Program highlights

  • Our Level IV Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is fortunate to be supported by a strong mental health team. This includes a NICU psychologist, a psychiatrist, and graduate and PhD interns all dedicated to care for you and your partner. The availability of a full-time NICU psychologist is an important innovation in care and has led to national recognition for our NICU.
  • We provide mental health screening for both you and your partner. When we recognize symptoms of depression, anxiety, or PTSD, we offer you/you and your partner psychological support and treatment. If you are interested in completing a confidential parental mental health screening, please speak with your social worker, and we will send you the screening questionnaire for completion.

In our NICU at Stanford Children’s, we provide the following types of mental health care support to parents:

Our NICU at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford was one of the first in the nation to pilot and develop a proven therapy approach to address PTSD symptoms in NICU parents. In this six-session intervention, you and your partner will learn coping skills to help reduce your symptoms of psychological distress, improve your sleep, and better bond with your baby. You will also learn healthy approaches to parenting to reduce the risk of overprotective parenting, which can hinder your child’s growth and resilience.

  • Overprotective parenting is known as vulnerable child syndrome, whereby parents continue to treat their child as fragile throughout the child’s life. This can hinder growth, development, and mental health, so we help you avoid this syndrome and gain confidence in your child’s resilience.

Our research-based intervention was found to result in significant decreases in parental symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, and depression, both immediately following the intervention and at a six-month follow-up appointment.

Whether your baby’s journey to the NICU was expected or a complete surprise, you might feel guilt, sadness, shock, isolation, helplessness, sadness, anxiety, depression. We understand how important your well-being is to your baby’s healing. That’s why we offer a peer support group to help you reduce your NICU stress and learn to enjoy and support your baby’s growth and development.

This support group welcomes you to come together with other NICU moms. The group is a safe space where mothers share their experience and learn skills to cope with trauma, stress, and sadness. From this support group you can expect:

  • Facilitation by our psychologist who specializes in NICU care.
  • A chance to ask a lactation consultant any questions about breastfeeding.
  • Weekly drop-in sessions that last 90 minutes. You can join in person and/or virtually.

Any mother who is 18 years of age or older and has a child in our NICU or Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health is welcome to join this group in case they would find it beneficial.

When you have a baby in the NICU, it can be intimidating to know how to interact with them. iRainbow is a novel guide—developed by one of our neonatologists, Melissa Scala, MD—that helps you actively parent your baby in the NICU. The guide provides important stress reduction tools and a list of safe activities to choose from to encourage your baby’s growth and development. In simple terms, iRainbow can help you to be empowered as a parent and bond with your infant.

We know that care doesn’t end when you move to a regular floor or walk out of our doors with your new baby. That’s why we continue to support you in the following ways:

Parent Infant Psychotherapy Program

When you go home, you may need extra support interacting with your baby. This program helps decrease anxieties around caring for your child and helps you bond with your child.

If you are interested in learning more about these mental health services for NICU parents, talk with your Stanford Children’s provider for more information.