"The city has created a so-called "stress-free zone" in a low-income Brooklyn neighborhood where new parents can get everything from free massages to mental-health screenings to combat maternal mortality. Brownsville's "Neighborhood Stress-Free Zone" pilot - located at the Department of Health's Neighborhood Health Action Center Family Wellness Suite - opened in September to combat a deeply disturbing increase in the rate, which has been fueled by overdoses and suicides, officials said."
""We in New York City have historically not been very good at recognizing a post-partum birthing person ... who's experiencing depression," said Dr. Zahirah McNatt, acting assistant commissioner for the Bureau of Brooklyn Neighborhood Health, to The Post. "They might even go to a hospital and be sent home [during a crisis]," he said of struggling moms. "When that experience becomes psychosis, then we're in a world that is harder to manage.""
Brownsville's Neighborhood Stress-Free Zone pilot at the Department of Health's Neighborhood Health Action Center Family Wellness Suite opened in September to address rising pregnancy-associated deaths. The site offers free parenting workshops, cooking classes, social groups, diaper distributions, massages, and mental-health and perinatal screenings. Staff screens families for social-care needs such as housing and food, and for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. The pilot is modeled on a stress-free zone created in upstate Buffalo 25 years ago. City maternal mortality figures rose from 58 deaths in 2021 to 66 deaths in 2022, a 13.7 percent increase, with overdoses and suicides contributing.
Read at New York Post
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