Gold Coast professor, mum and midwife Julie Jomeen on birth trauma, mental health and new baby joys
This professor is an expert in mental health and pregnancy – but learned plenty as a midwife on the frontline, and from her own birthing highs and lows. This is her inspiring story.
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Professor Julie Jomeen isn’t just an academic expert when it comes to the mental health and wellbeing of new parents.
The Southern Cross University Faculty of Health executive dean spent years working as a midwife herself in the UK, starting in her early 20s – and also has two children of her own.
“It’s just such a precious privileged profession, to be there at that point in time. It isn’t all about looking after women giving birth. It’s about looking after women during pregnancy and afterwards.
“There’s nothing more special than being in a room with a woman giving birth and a partner or husband is there. They’re so excited about this baby coming, it’s a wanted baby and the just the whole feeling is a real privilege.”
She still remembers the first time she witnessed a live birth: “I cried, I was so emotionally swept up – the whole emotion of the experience, the emotion of the parents, the way the midwife was and how she interacted and worked with that couple.
“Just really a very emotional moment for me and I guess then thinking this is a job I would really like to do. I’m quite an emotional person anyway, so I do get quite touched by things. “You kind of feel ‘Should I be a bit more professional?’ – but that inability to not be able to not cry was really quite special.”
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The mother of two’s own experience of childbirth and motherhood has had the highest of highs and lowest of lows: “I had a baby that died. I had one little girl and then a second little girl born at 28 weeks who didn’t survive. Then I went on and had my son. Having that experience definitely changed me. It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever been through.”
She found it difficult to return to being a midwife: “It was really hard to be in that environment where people were excited and happy. I did go back to work. (But) that absolutely gave me a different perspective on how to care for those people who don’t have good outcomes.”
Ms Jomeen said people didn’t have to go through childbirth to be a good midwife: “But obviously when you’ve been through any experience yourself, you have a different perspective.
“You probably can’t describe labour pain until you’ve really been through it. You can’t describe how it feels as that baby emerges until you’ve really been through it – even though you can appreciate what it might be like.
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“That makes a difference, certainly the more difficult personal experience I had.”
It also informed her decision to embark on studying mental wellbeing during pregnancy and birth for the past 20 years, which led her to the Gold Coast and SCU, a sponsor of the Entrepreneurs category in the Gold Coast Bulletin Women of the Year by Harvey Norman.
She took up the SCU role in 2020, having been the Dean of Health at the University of Hull in the UK.
Ms Jomeen has a long list of research credits, wrote an award-winning book Choice, Control and Contemporary Childbirth which linked women’s choice and decision-making in the peri-natal period to psychological health outcomes.
“I suppose what my work has taught me over the last 20 years is we need to be able to recognise in women during the childbirth period that it is an emotionally labile period, and evoke reactions that are normal. But there will also be a proportion of women for whom, for whatever reason, childbirth is a huge kind of psychological challenge.
“People come into pregnancy and childbirth with all sorts of history, including a history of mental health problems. And whilst we need to really make sure we have the support services for the people who need it at the right time, we’ve also got to make sure we don’t over pathologize mental health. So we almost say that anybody who’s feeling a bit, you know, down, has got a mental health problem, because that’s a normal kind of life cycle. Pregnancy is a really concentrated time limited, intense experience. So you get that concentration of emotional lability throughout.”
And then there can a stressful aftermath which is just as important.
“When everything goes well, in a maternity context, it’s fabulous, but things don’t always.
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“There’ll always be births you remember, because they were just phenomenal. And then there will be births you remember because things didn’t go to plan, you had to support women in a very different way, and that would include babies who are born with problems, or babies who are not born alive. That’s all part of maternity care as well.
“How you then support a woman, a couple, a family, in that context that’s confronting for all of us. Of course, you deal with death in nursing all the time, and serious illness. But people don’t expect it in a maternity care context.
“We’ve got to a point where technology and healthcare is so advanced, people think everything can be dealt with and everything can be managed. Actually, there still is the hand of God or whatever it is that plays its part. Not everything can be managed, repaired and predicted.
“There’s a context that you have to deal with there, where people are just so completely shocked that it hasn’t gotten to a successful conclusion.”
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