Welcome to the second quarterly update of the TABS website!

Replacing our Newsletter, this page briefly describes and provides links to the updates located elsewhere in this site.

Included are six things that we would particularly like to bring to your attention:

• Cheryl Beck has kindly provided an update on her study. TABS highly appreciates and values Cheryl's contributions and encouragement.
• Birth Trauma Support Group from Brisbane, Australia has provided an update on their progress.
• We are pleased to be expanding our list of counsellors within New Zealand. We would especially like to hear from people outside Auckland who can offer appropriate help.
• Also available is a flyer that can be displayed on noticeboards in your place of work or in places where it can be seen by mothers suffering from PTSD after childbirth.
• In our new links below, you will find two British websites relating to Birth Trauma. They approach this topic in differing ways, and we are sure you will find them very interesting.
• A new book: Life after baby loss by Nicola Miller-Clendon, Tandem Press: Auckland, 2003: "Each year an astonishing one out of five conceptions will result in pregnancy loss, very often leaving families bereft and faced with uncertainty." In this new to press book, the writer, a New Zealand friend of TABS, considers many issues associated with belonging to "a club of which nobody wants to be a member."

We are delighted to notify you of the updates to our website listed below. We make contact with a wide range of groups to promote our message about PTSD being a valid and viable explanation for some maternal mental and emotional health issues. We are very grateful when they mention us on their websites, and we pay them the same courtesy. Many of our links arise from contacts such as these, as well as from other groups who discover and approach us independently.

TABS Study Day: Auckland, New Zealand: 15 March 2004. Click on this link for more details.

Your support and interest in our website continues to be impressive. As at 9.22am NZT on August 31 2003, our site had received 4588 visits since it was launched, an additional 2824 in the last three months.

Thank you for your continued support and your responses. We are aware that many people who receive our information do not contact us. That is fine, though of course we do like to hear from people - our main concern is for PTSD sufferers to receive help of whatever kind is appropriate through the information that we are providing.

Thank you again for visiting this site - we hope you will one or more of our updates helpful.

Sue, on behalf of the TABS Committee

There are now 46 mothers who have participated in the study. Twenty six mothers (more than half the sample) are from New Zealand, 10 are from the United States, 7 from Australia, and 3 from the United Kingdom. From these mothers' powerful stories I have written two articles. The first article is entitled "Birth Trauma: In the Eye of the Beholder. The second article's title is PTSD After Childbirth: The Aftermath". I am waiting to hear back from the editor of the journal to see if the articles have been accepted yet for publication. Just before the articles are published, I would like to offer the mothers who have participated in my study the chance to have a sneak preview of the findings. If you are interested in this, please just send me an email saying that you would like to have me send by attachment a summary of the findings of the study. I will keep a list of your emails and when the articles are ready to be published, I will send them to you.

This May I will be presenting the findings of our study in Tarragona, Spain. I have been asked to speak at the National Spanish Midwifery Congress. It will be my honor to share your words and voices with the midwives of Spain to help educate them about birth trauma and PTSD after childbirth.

Thank you again to all the mothers who have been so unselfish and giving in sharing your stories with me, a perfect stranger.

My email address is cheryl.beck@uconn.edu.

Just wanted to give you an update on how we are going in Australia. We have become more formalised as a group and I am grateful to have Kathy and Trish on board to help make the public more aware of PTSD. Both Kath and Trish have also had traumatic birth experiences and as a group we are keen to make a difference in how birth is viewed by society and want to help and support other women who have had traumatic birth experiences. We have been working hard (in between looking after our own families) in producing our own "Bad Birth Experience" brochure. You can download this from the TABS website.

At present we are distributing the brochures wherever we can. We offer email and phone support to women and in Brisbane we have set up a support group. We have been advertising our services in places such as the BubHub website (so that women in all States can reach us), local papers, community child health centres and other birth oriented groups. We are also in contact and still hoping to get formal brochures/info on PTSD printed up by organisations such as Tressilian (organisation who produces booklets, brochures etc..that go into the Baby Bounty Packs in hospitals for new mothers) and QLD Women's Health and QLD Health. If anyone would like to show their support and help us get PTSD 'out there' we would love to hear from you. Perhaps you'd like to send your birth story in and we could forward this to these organisations to make them aware of how important this topic is - how devastating a traumatic birth experience can be and how it can affect us and our families. (Any information sent would be anonymous. We would not use any names without your permission).

Recently I have been asked by Jenny Gamble (Lecturer, Master of Midwifery Program at the School of Nursing) to come and give a talk at a class about Traumatic Birth Experiences and the work of our group. They have a session called Women's voices - it is within the course "complexities of childbirth" and focuses on complications. This is our first 'public appearance' and though I am wondering how I will go talking about such a vulnerable topic that is close to my heart - I am looking forward to it.

Ursula from this group has provided us a a poem, which is on our stories page.

Information from Nimisha Waller

Nimisha Waller, Senior Lecturer in Midwifery, is at present doing a thesis on how women make sense of traumatic birth experiences and PTSD following childbirth. She is interested in what the midwives' role in this is. She can be contacted on pnwaller@clear.net.nz, and is happy to answer queries and questions and hear from anybody interested in this area.

New Zealand Counsellors wanted

To meet the demand in New Zealand for counsellors who are skilled in the diagnosis and treatment of PTSD, TABS wishes to maintain a list of appropriately skilled and qualified practitioners.

TABS is prepared to list such people in return for a fee - that will go towards the maintenance and updating of this website.

If you would like such a listing, please log your request by completing and forwarding the attached form.

Select here a previous update (updates to main body of website now omitted):

• 1 June 2003