Publish date: 16 May 2025
In part 2 of our Mental Health Awareness Week feature…
Fulham resident Natalii, reflects on how her community helped her to start healing an old festering wound, Fizzah delves into how her community nurtured her through difficult times to brighter days, and Aman tells us having a culturally aware community makes a difference in supporting the mental wellbeing of ethnic minorities.
If you missed part 1 you can catch up on it here on our website.
*If you are pregnant, or a new parent living in West London and are affected by the issues in these stories you can get support by texting the word HUG to 85258.
“I relived what happened again and again”
For 13 years, Natalii, a nursery worker and yoga teacher, silently carried a heavy weight that took a toll on her.
“I kept it for many years in my soul. It’s not my secret but the whole time it was in my heart like a big stone. I cannot forget this,” said the 43-year-old mum of three who resides in Fulham.
Natalii and her son moved to the UK during the Ukraine war. Her husband, a soldier, would join later, and she became pregnant.
“My trauma was many years ago, 12 years ago, but nobody spoke with me about this. I was thinking about it every day because I was pregnant and my baby stopped moving at nine months. It was very hard,” said Natalii.
For Natalii, her situation was compounded by loneliness and worries about the war.
“When we came here with my son, we felt very alone, and we didn’t know another language and we didn’t know anyone. It was very hard.
“My heart beats fast and I feel very unwell but I’ve been learning how to reduce those bad feelings. I was very scared and I felt really bad. The stress of the war in Ukraine, I was scared and sometimes I would wake up in the night feeling very bad and I would relive what happened many years ago, again and again.”
“No one knew what to say to me”
Natalii’s midwife referred her to West London’s Maternity Trauma and Loss Care Service, where she started seeing a therapist.
“I spent a lot of time with my therapist Gina. She taught me how to reduce my stress, using Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR).”
Though she is still on her journey, Natalii said her community has been vital in embarking on the road to recovery.
“Working with children at the nursery and running my yoga classes have helped me a lot. My son, midwife, therapist, husband and people at work are my community. It’s also been very helpful for me to meditate and exercise.
“I want to help others going through the same thing. For women it’s very important to speak to someone and have community. When it happened to me I couldn’t speak to anyone because no one knew what to say to me,” said Natalii.
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“They were the main pillars of helping me get better” – Fizzah
Without her community, Fizzah, a mum of two, couldn’t imagine how she would have gotten through a severe bipolar episode that followed her first pregnancy.
In 2017, Fizzah had had a smooth pregnancy that was monitored and supported by West London’s Perinatal Team. But a series of events led to a tumultuous period for her and her family.
“After pregnancy it was really bad, after my son. He was a week overdue, my waters broke and my legs were really swollen. When I went hospital, they looked at the wrong paperwork. Turns out I had blood clots in both legs. They gave me some tights and because it was dangerous I had to do an emergency C-section the following day.
“After my son was born I kept getting infection after infection. A month after I had a massive bipolar episode and I didn’t know what I was doing, my mood was very unstable. They hospitalised me, sent me to a mother and baby unit where I stayed for six months. Then they gave my son to my mum and sent me to a unit in Ealing for a few months, after which I moved to Luton to be closer to my mum,” said Fizzah.
Throughout this time, Fizzah struggled being apart from her family, but continued to receive vital support from her community.
“I lost about nine months of my life with my son, it was horrible. But the Perinatal team was with me at the time, I had some psychology therapy, I had a mental health team, and crisis team and saw a care coordinator every week.
“My mum and my husband were quite supportive, and my siblings helped to monitor me at home. I was very angry, aggressive and they stuck by me during the difficult times.
“Along with the mental health teams, and care coordinator, they were the main pillars of helping me get better. If I didn’t have all of this, I don’t know where I’d be.”
Thanks to the support she received, Fizzah said she’s doing much better now and is enjoying her time being mum to Jaffar and Abeeha.
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“You get put in this little box” – Unconscious biases, community and breaking the mould
Aman Dhami’s first pregnancy happened during the COVID-19 pandemic so she had been unable to attend any baby classes and meet with other expectant mums. So when she got pregnant last August, she was excited to have a different experience.
But her pregnancy was again marred by severe Hyperemesis gravidarum (severe pregnancy sickness), which led to her spending the majority of her pregnancy in hospital. It had a profound impact on her mental health.
“I was referred to the Perinatal Mental Health Team and had a team of midwives. They were brilliant. The hospital care was amazing, and I was really supported by the majority of professionals. I had an occupational therapist, nursery nurses, psychologist, and a doctor who gave me medicine because I did feel I missed a lot of time with my older son because I was in hospital four to five days a week, every week and it was really tough for me,” said Aman.
Aman’s perinatal team advocated for her to get training so she could take fluids at home so she no longer needed to spend so much time in hospital, away from her son.
“They were there to support me, and gave me coping strategies and helped me to bond with my son. I still have my good and bad days but there is light at the end of the tunnel, so we keep on going,” she said.
“I made a friend across the road”
Aman said it’s made all the difference having a community that she could be open with about her mental health.
“My community is my family and health professionals. Because of my physical health conditions, I can’t go out as much as I’d like to. The nursery nurse helped with doing baby massage at home with me and that was amazing so I could still do that and be part of that, and I have a big support network via my siblings. My mum and dad are really hands on and so is my husband. I recently moved into the area and I made a friend across the road, she has a baby too, and there are a couple of other people on the street who have babies too so it’s nice to speak to other mums and offload a bit. It makes you feel less isolated when you hear from other mums going this or that.”
In her day job Aman is a peer support worker for another NHS perinatal service. While community removes the isolation of struggling alone, Aman said not everyone may be able to open up, and more needs to be done to address this.
“Coming from an ethnic background, not everyone is open to talking about these things. If I’m having a bad day I’ll just say it as it is whereas I know some people are quite boundaried about these things and because of deep rooted culture, understandably it’s a big job to break down these barriers. I’m fortunate to have a family that’s understanding and are able to listen and be there in that moment and not just brush it off. Slowly and surely we’ll break the mould. Maternal mental health awareness for ethnic minorities is something I’m really passionate about.
"I still feel like there’s a huge group of people that we’re not reaching, because of cultural barriers and it’s great that in the Maternal Mental Health Awareness week West London NHS Trust went into temples and were speaking to mums, which is amazing, because there’s so much community in the temples, and it’s a good place to meet mums. It makes me really happy that’s happening now,” she said.
While it’s a step in the right direction, Aman said everyone has a part to play, including in addressing unconscious bias towards people from different ethnic backgrounds.
“Perhaps because some people come across as Asian, well spoken, work for the NHS and they tick all these boxes, there’s an unconscious bias that comes across in the way things are worded sometimes and it makes you put your barriers up straight away because you’re put in this little box where the assumption is everything is great for you. These assumptions are a lot for people from ethnic backgrounds because they think we’re hard, we’re tough. In West London the perinatal team is diverse so there’s a better understanding of cultural differences.” said Aman.
Though she is still on her recovery journey, Aman is hopeful for the future.
“I’m really proud to be able to share my story. It’s still a journey for me. I’m still not 100 percent recovered and maybe I won’t ever be because of the trauma I’ve been through and I am now ok with that. Everyone breaks sometimes, and it's ok. I hope that my story will help others to feel less alone. With the right support we can start to heal."