Welcome to the Pioneers in Health podcast. In this podcast, we share inspiring stories of pioneering leaders from our nation and from your backyard who are working to improve health.
In episode 24, we interview Becca Graves, executive director at Perigee Fund. The Perigee Fund is a philanthropy that focuses on increasing support for families impacted by trauma. It invests in systems change to ensure that during pregnancy and early childhood, more families receive healing programs, services and resources that protect and nurture their unfolding relationships.
In this episode, Becca discusses her economic mindset and a twist of fate that led to her working in philanthropy.
She discusses how in a previous role she was part of many conversations where people discussed the long-term impact of childhood trauma on adults or how to support high school students who had experienced early trauma.
“I was always in the room thinking, why are we not doing something earlier?” Becca said.
“Mental health begins before birth, and the well-being of parents as they expect a child is incredibly important.”
– Becca Graves
Becca discusses the importance of this and how it’s critical to address mental health during pregnancy, as it’s not only important for the parents, but it’s also where mental health for a child begins.
“Mental health begins before birth, and the well-being of parents as they expect a child is incredibly important,” she said. “Maternal mental health complications during pregnancy and postpartum are incredibly common. Maternal depression is the one of the original ACEs. And, largely, maternal mental health complications are preventable and treatable.”
ACEs refers to Adverse Childhood Experience score, which is derived from a questionnaire that measures exposure to different types of adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, neglect or household dysfunction.
“Addressing the well-being of children absolutely starts with their caregivers,” Becca said.
Perinatal mental health specialists are few and far between, she said, so she said they’ve invested in perinatal psychiatry around the country for physicians.
She also discussed Perigee’s efforts to affect policies and system change, which often centers on efforts to treat the baby and caregiver as a family unit instead of as individuals. At this stage of life, the relationship between the two is critically important.
“They should receive care that is connected,” she said. “There is a phrase in the infant mental health world that there’s no such thing as a baby on its own. It’s always a baby and a caregiver together. So, a lot of the policy innovation can be very, very specific to changing practice to serve the family as a unit.”
In this episode, she also discusses:
Her journey to working at the Perigee Fund
Perigee’s approach to mental health
How addressing the well-being of children starts with addressing the caregivers’ well-being; she mentions the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up home-visiting program, a model the Health Fund supported to determine its efficacy in Kansas
How health insurance, including the public health insurance program Medicaid, is critical for helping mothers and babies
The importance of nurturing the bond between parents and their child
