Jenise Katalina
“We need to talk about mental health. We need to talk about how hard it is, and we need to move back to being a collective culture and being supportive of each other and helping each other in that way.”
Jenise Katalina has recently created her own private practice, Kindred Healing Counseling Services, where she specializes in supporting individuals experiencing intergenerational/racial trauma, perinatal mood disorders, parenting stress and anxiety. Her connection to this work has been informed by her personal experiences in mental health, her Social Work education and her career experiences in supporting multigenerational families. She has been actively involved in supporting families with young children in the Springfield area through direct services, community organizing and advocating. In addition, she is on the executive leadership team of The Women of Color Health Equity Collective where she builds community capacity to support those along the intersections of health, race and gender as a trainer and consultant.
Jenise's passion work is focused on maternal mental health in the Black and Brown community. Her continued inspiration are her two children, Brady and Delyla. She continues to live and work in the Springfield area, where she was born and has been home to her family for generations.
This blog is made possible by a sponsorship from Sage Therapeutics. All content on this page has been curated by the Mass. PPD Fund without input from Sage Therapeutics, Inc.
November 2022 | Interviewed and edited by Jessie Colbert, Executive Director, Mass. PPD Fund
The Mass. PPD Fund is proud to feature the story of Springfield’s Jenise L. Katalina, MSW, LICSW, of the Women of Color Health Equity Collective and a leading state and local trainer, coach, clinician, and home visiting expert, now in private practice. Like one-third of birthing people, Jenise’s anxiety and depression showed up during pregnancy. Her providers misidentified it as high blood pressure, and she herself didn’t identify it until four years later during a work training on Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (PMADs). Jenise advocates for a collectivist response to PMADs with a social and racial justice lens.
Did you have expectations about bringing home a new baby? What were your hopes and fears?
I am the oldest of three siblings. I am the oldest female cousin. And we have multiple generations of cousins, too. So my role was always a caretaking one. I always joke with my cousins and with my brother, like, I changed your diapers! I think becoming a parent, I didn't see it being that different. For me it was, I already know what to do. I've taken care of these babies through my lifetime.
It was also kind of believing that whole piece of, like, motherhood is the most beautiful thing. It’s going to be your instinct, and natural, and all of these things. I don't think the reality of motherhood really showed up for me.
Oftentimes when a baby is born, parents have plenty of support for the baby, but not a lot of support for themselves. Did you feel like you had people looking out for you? If so, who?
I didn't think about that. I think beforehand [I felt] that I was going to know what to do. My partner hadn't had the experience but was willing to learn and kind of take my direction. I didn't think I was going to need a lot of that help, besides the standard, like, Can you come watch the baby while we go out for a night? I think that was kind of natural, having a family that was willing to do that.
I didn't think that I was going to need – and I didn't receive – the support in the way of, like, my mental health. My perinatal depression and anxiety started while I was pregnant, and I didn't recognize it. I didn’t even know these things existed.
Tell me about your journey with mental health challenges around your new baby. When did you realize something was “not right”?
I think it started a little bit later in my pregnancy, probably in my second trimester where I started feeling just a lot of that anxiety and depression. It was an unplanned pregnancy, so I think that sudden shift in life was a lot to process. It was a lot of sadness, a lot of feeling lonely, of missing things and not feeling connected to people. Constantly battling, like, Am I going to be a good parent? And physically it was showing up as hypertension, pregnancy high blood pressure. And it was really me having anxiety.
It definitely got worse after I had the baby. I ended up having to get induced because I was hypertensive. Had a very healthy baby, and there were no complications with my delivery, everything went well. You know, I think for the first couple of weeks, it was just a lot of, Okay, this is natural. I'm not sleeping, we’re both up all night. I was home for a while, so I would try to get out, go walk around the mall, try to do things. I was crying a lot when people weren't around, and withdrawing myself. Every time I got in the shower, it would just take over me and I would start crying. My biggest fear was Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, so I was constantly checking on the baby -popping up to check on him, checking his chest that he was breathing, making sure there was nothing in the crib, or he wasn't rolling over. And then a lot of questioning myself. Making sure that my child was presentable and dressed up when we went out in public. And not really putting that attention on myself.
I would express to people that things were just tough and I was tired. So I got a lot of, like, I'll take the baby and you take a shower, go for a walk – those types of [offers]. I remember there was one time where [my partner] came into the bathroom while I was literally just on the floor in the shower, crying. He asked what was wrong, but to me the tone was like it was an accusatory thing – not really wanting to hear and be empathetic. And so it was like, No, nothing, I’m fine. And keep going. And again, I never heard the words perinatal or postpartum depression or anxiety from anybody, not even my midwife.
What turned things around for you?
I was feeling this way for a couple of years. I did end up going into therapy on my own maybe a year and a half postpartum. And even then, it was a lot of work around anxiety and depression, but the postpartum piece wasn't really identified.
It wasn't actually until I was pregnant with my second child about four years later, and I was working as a home visitor for a program where we went through training around postpartum depression, when it was like, Oh yeah, this is what I was experiencing with my first child! I was lucky at that time to be working in a world where people have this education and this knowledge, so I had great peers. They were really supportive of me through my postpartum. And I was much more open and comfortable with sharing. I was like, if I'm going out there and supporting other parents, and telling them [perinatal mood disorders] are very common and you need to share to get help, then I need to be doing that myself, too. So I very much claimed it.
Looking back, what do you wish you had known? What do you wish others around you had known or done?
I feel like there definitely should have been more knowledge, more information shared. Just say the words. To not even hear that postpartum depression or perinatal mood disorders exist, right!? And I know with my first one, I wasn’t screened. How did we not do that? I think if that had happened, honestly, there would have been a better chance of someone recognizing that something was going on for me, that it wasn't just hypertension.
There’s a lot culturally I think that plays into it as well. Especially across older generations in the Latino and Latinx community, having that mindset of, you know, we don't talk about personal things. Like, you were more encouraged to take medication for physical pain than for mental health. Even the struggles of parenting and having a new baby wasn't really talked about – it’s just something that you did. You kind of suck it up and keep going. No, we need to talk about mental health. We need to talk about how hard it is, and we need to move back to being a collective culture and being supportive of each other and helping each other in that way.
I'm very open about talking about having depression and anxiety, and I name it. I say, This is my anxiety kicking in right now. It’s been interesting how we’ve moved towards normalizing this language. I noticed that shift even within my own family – and I’m a mental health clinician! While I'm happy that we have come to where we're at, it’s still sad that it wasn't that long ago that we weren’t getting the support that we needed. It wasn't getting recognized and it wasn't getting talked about.
Do you identify as a “survivor?
I do. And I identify that every day I'm still kind of fighting my own mental illness – not even a mental illness, but just my own mentality. It's not that I have gone gotten over anxiety and depression. This is something that we have to persevere through every day, and we are doing it in a way that we can't do it alone. We need support. We need our own tools and strategies and a lot of it is unlearning stuff from the past, too.
What is the most important thing you’d like to share with other new parents?
I would tell them that they're not alone. These are all things that have existed over thousands of years – we’ve just now started recognizing the effects that it has on folks and putting names and labels to it. And: it's okay. It's okay to talk about it, it’s okay to seek support. There are people out there who have experienced it and can help. We need to be there for each other like that. Children and babies were not intended to come into isolation or to individuals, right? Children are meant to be raised by a community. And so building your community and your support network is important.