A groundbreaking trial aimed at transforming mental health care for pregnant and new mothers in lower-income countries has been stopped in its tracks in the wake of Donald Trump slashing US foreign aid, The Independent has learned.
The pioneering project in India was looking at how to make the best help available to women from pregnancy through the first year of their babies’ lives, to address what experts have described as a “silent burden” for millions of women in a report commissioned by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The report, published in 2021 ahead of the launch of the India project, said mental health was, “conspicuously absent from global maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health programming, despite increasing awareness of the intergenerational impact of [these] disorders”.
The aim of the project was to test how to make what we already know about treating mental ill health available to people with no access to these services. This knowledge could then be applied in other low- and middle-income countries.
In the early days of his second presidency, Trump froze all foreign aid before going on to permanently slash the majority of it, impacting swathes of global health programmes.
Maternal health including life-saving work to stop deadly bleeding and ensure safety of drugs has been affected, but some of the biggest impacts have been on work to promote mental health and gender equality.
Insiders have described “heartbreak” that the programme – which was the first of its kind – has been cut off just as it was beginning to bear fruit, meaning after years of groundwork, the world won’t see the benefit of the research findings.
Some one billion people worldwide are living with a mental illness – around 80 per cent of which are in low- and middle-income countries – yet the vast majority of these people receive no treatment. The risks are higher during pregnancy and the year after birth.
Mental illness is among the leading causes of maternal mortality worldwide, with postpartum depression accounting for 20 per cent of deaths among women in the year after childbirth, reports associated with the USAID programme suggest.
This not only harms mothers but is linked to an increased risk of low birthweight and preterm birth, poorer cognitive development and common childhood illnesses in babies, the documents said. As well as the mental impacts, it puts mothers at higher risk of physical problems like high blood pressure and of dying from any cause later in life.
Preliminary research spearheaded by USAID in 2020 looked at 19 countries and found mental health programmes for mothers were small-scale and reliant on external funding. It found a lack of national policies and government-funded health systems that were struggling to add mental health screening and care to routine maternal services.
The halted India research was one of the first concrete steps to respond to these gaps, finding ways to screen women and train midwives and health workers so that mental health services could become a routine part of wider health services for women.
The Independent has approached the State Department for comment, but has yet to receive a reply.
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
