Emily Turinas

The day you bring your baby home from the NICU should feel like pure celebration, right? After days, weeks, or months of hospital visits, monitor alarms, medical procedures, and fear—finally, you get to take your baby home. Your family is together under one roof. Your baby is healthy enough to leave. The acute crisis is over. So why doesn't it feel the way you expected? As a perinatal psychologist specializing in maternal mental health and NICU trauma in Austin, Texas who experienced two NICU...

After five weeks of antepartum hospitalization and a C-section at 35 weeks, I thought the hardest part was behind me. I'd mentally prepared for the possibility that my premature baby might need NICU care—the doctors had told me there was a 50/50 chance. When he was admitted for nine days due to prematurity-related concerns, I felt ready. Scared, but ready. What I wasn't prepared for was going home for a week and a half, finally having our family under one roof for the first time in over six...

When we talk about postpartum mental health, we often focus on "typical" postpartum experiences—the baby blues, adjusting to life with a newborn, sleep deprivation, hormonal changes. But there's a hidden mental health crisis that doesn't get nearly enough attention: women who experience pregnancy complications, traumatic births, premature delivery, or NICU stays face dramatically higher rates of postpartum depression, anxiety, and PTSD—yet they're often screened and supported at the same...