Each year, there are about 24,000 stillborn babies in the United States, making stillbirth more than 10 times as prevalent as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Many families find themselves devastated by a stillbirth event, defined as the loss of a baby at or after 20 weeks of pregnancy, either before or during delivery.
The grief experienced by individuals impacted by a stillbirth is unique and challenging. You might find yourself wondering if you will ever be able to recover after stillbirth. Long-term feelings of sadness related to your stillbirth are natural. However, with time and the right mental health support, you can find peace and joy in your ongoing life with your surviving family.
The intense devastation of grief after loss doesn’t have to last forever. At Nugent Family Counseling Center of San Jose, California, Los Gatos, California, and Reno, Nevada, we understand the toll that stillbirths take on expectant mothers and families.
Let our experienced counseling and psychiatry care team help you and your loved ones get through this exceptionally difficult time.
Grief and stillbirth
Any loss of a loved one leaves us experiencing grief, a complex emotion that’s different for everyone and never follows a set timeline or neat, one-way progression toward healing. Recovering from any loss can be a triggering event, and cause you to need additional mental health support.
However, stillbirth occurs in the later weeks of pregnancy, when you’re likely to have been looking forward to meeting and loving your baby. The loss of a child just before birth and the beginning of life can be difficult to accept, more so in some ways than the passing of an elder.
Stillbirth can leave you shocked, depressed, and despairing, or even angry or guilty. Your emotions after the loss may be complex, shifting, unstable, or contradictory. You may notice that your moods swing easily, or that you struggle with frequent weeping or over-sleep as a result of your grief.
You should know that all of your emotions after stillbirth are normal, and also that you also deserve mental health care and support during this painful and challenging time.
Mental health recovery after stillbirth
All types of grief can benefit from mental health counseling, but it’s especially important with traumatic losses like stillbirth events to seek care and support from an experienced counselor or therapist. You may be able to ease your recovery by getting the care you need immediately after your traumatic loss.
Your provider at Nugent Family Counseling Center assists you in processing the complex emotions of grief, loss, abandonment, despair, and shock that you may be experiencing after a stillbirth. Mental health counseling support can also help in the aftermath of a miscarriage or SIDS-related child loss.
While your life will never be the same again after the loss of your stillborn baby, you can still find hope for the future and prevent prolonged grief from negatively harming you and your loved ones. Reach out to the mental health care experts at Nugent Family Counseling Center for compassionate, individualized grief and mourning support after a stillbirth or miscarriage.
Schedule your appointment with one of the providers at Nugent Family Counseling Center using our online tool now, or call today to set up your first counseling session.