By Love Wilhelmina Abanonave
Co-Principal Investigator, Ghana Team Lead at the Ghana Health Service, Professor Irene Agyepong has emphasized the need to incorporate mental health initiatives for pregnant women who attend antenatal stating that, it is usually not given the needed attention.
“Pregnant women go for antenatal and receive delivery and post-natal care but no one pays attention to their mental health”, she said.
Speaking at the RESPONSE project dissemination meeting on Tuesday, December 2, 2025 in Accra, Professor Agyepong stated that pregnant women also get stressed, anxious and depressed but are often directed to pantang hospital.
She added that there has been some interventions through the RESPONSE project to aid pregnant women, their family members, communities and even health workers themselves.
The first intervention according to her is integrating mental health care into maternal health care.
“What we have introduced is basically a very simple screening which should be part of antenatal care, postnatal care and delivery and takes just five minutes”, she noted.
The second intervention involves extending the mental health screening to the frontline health workers who provide healthcare to the patients. Professor Agyepong noted that, only then would they be able to take care of others.
The third intervention has to do with involving adolescent mothers in the mental health care.
She explained that though society frowns on teenage pregnancy, they should not be left out.
“In fact, nobody wants an adolescent to become a mother but it happens. They have far more mental health problems than the adult mothers because they are too young to start childbearing so we have also started working on the adolescent health program. The program will help adolescents go back to school”.
Speaking at the event, Principal Investigator at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Professor Tolib Mirzoev added that the RESPONSE project aside providing mental health care to mothers, is also focused on the confidentiality, dignity and respect of these mothers which are often sidelined and neglected.
The RESPONSE project seeks to evaluate the interventions recommended in six Primary health care facilities in two districts in the Greater Accra region.
Key findings from the project include:
Maternal Mental Health
Maternal mental health is an important but neglected problem in Primary Health care system.
Of the 2023 maternal health clients screened with the 20 item WHO Self Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ20) to help identify those who needed support in relation to maternal mental health, it was found that 28% had SRQ. 20 of them scored six or higher indicating, they needed further evaluation and support for potential mental health distress.
5% had suicidal ideation.
Traditionally, attention is paid to postpartum depression.
However, problems sometimes start at the antenatal stage. 25% of women seen at postnatal clinics and 36% of women seen at antenatal clinics had scores 6 or higher and some groups of maternal health clients were at significantly higher risk of mental health distress.
There were eight women in the sample who lost the fetus. Of these eight, four of them which is 50% had SRQ scores 6 or higher.
Adolescents aged 10 -19 were another vulnerable group. Four maternal heath clients were aged 14 and 168 were 15 – 19 years. 74 out of these 172 adolescents that is 43% had SRQ20 scores of 6 or higher as compared to 27% of the women aged 20 years or older.
Maternal Mental health support is urgently needed.
The simple intervention co-designed and piloted in this project is a potential approach to addressing this need.
It will be important to develop an approach to scale up and evaluate effectiveness and cost effectiveness in using the scaleup approach to inform policy and practice.
