Promoting Infant Mental Health in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)

The environment and caregiving relationships in the early postnatal period are critical to an infant’s development, with implications for physical, social-emotional, and neurocognitive development.  Premature and medically vulnerable infants hospitalized in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) are biologically and neurologically more vulnerable and go through many stressors including some degree of separation from their parents, an intrusive and unnatural environment, and painful and distressing procedures. Their parents, in turn, experience higher rates of psychological distress and can face challenges in establishing an optimal relationship with their babies in this setting. In this talk, Dr. Givrad will point out some of the ways we can think about promoting premature and medically vulnerable infants’ wellbeing.

Soudabeh Givrad, MD is a perinatal and infant psychiatrist and an Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine. She is the director of the Maternal-Infant Psychiatry Program at Weill Cornell Medicine and the Perinatal and Infant Psychiatry Fellowship. She has expertise in treating psychiatric disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period and works with families of infants and young children in parent-infant psychotherapy when families face issues with attachment, bonding, medical traumas, or other regulatory disorders of infancy and early childhood. Academically, she has been working on bringing increased attention to psychiatric disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period, and to increase awareness of the critical importance of supporting families of young infants to optimize their development and bringing a continuum of care from pre-conception to age 3 for families. She has also been working on increasing training opportunities in perinatal and infant mental health for mental health clinicians.