Reproductive Psychiatry with Dr. Brittany Booth
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About My Guest
Dr. Brittany Booth is a board-certified, UCLA-trained adult psychiatrist with a special focus on treating people during reproductive transitions such as pregnancy and postpartum. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Boston University and her medical degree from UCLA. She also completed her psychiatry residency at UCLA, where she served as Chief Resident of the inpatient units and Chief Resident of the Women’s Life Center, a world-renowned center for reproductive psychiatry. In addition to her private practice, she is the associate director of the Women’s Life Center and sees patients in the UCLA Maternal Mental Health Intensive Outpatient Program. You can follow her on Instagram @Dr.BrittanyBooth.
In This Episode
Dr. Booth brings a wealth of experience to our discussion on medication management within the context of reproductive hormones. She explains the role of hormone shifts in disorders such as postpartum depression (PPD) and postpartum OCD. It can be a terrifying time for new parents as they navigate poor sleep, changes to almost every aspect of life, and new or changing mental health symptoms. She covers medication options for support during this time, including a new medication that responds more quickly than SSRIs to PPD, a potential lifeline for child-bearing people.
We explore what it means to “fail a medication,” a term often used in healthcare to indicate that a medication did not work for a patient, but that can be painful phrasing to hear. This can occur for a variety of reasons and open communication with one’s providers is helpful in assessing why a medication does not work and what alternatives might be available. Dr. Booth also touches on the value of having providers who communicate with each other, allowing for more responsive and comprehensive care, especially during times of higher need (like postpartum). In addition to failing a medication, new parents may feel stress when their bodies literally fail to do what is expected in human development. Wrestling with experiences of infertility or an inability to breastfeed can trigger intense feelings of shame, doubt, and sadness.
In reflecting on her own history, Dr. Booth shares a deeply vulnerable story from her training that is valuable for patients and providers alike to hear. As providers, we sometimes face failure in deeply painful ways, like when a patient dies by suicide whom we were trying to help. The grief and loss of losing a patient in this way is one many mental health providers face, but it is not often discussed openly. Dr. Booth encourages providers to speak with each other about these experiences and find appropriate venues for support. She shares how her training site provided helpful supports to herself and her peers to help process and learn from this experience.
Finally, Dr. Booth shares resources for finding additional information on reproductive psychiatry. Not all areas of the country have easy access to reproductively-informed psychiatric providers, but there are ways to bridge the gap through provider consultation and patient self-education as this field continues to grow, see below for where to access additional resources.
Resources Referenced
Post Partum Support International’s Perinatal Psychiatry Consultation Line for Providers
