Comedian Laura O\u2019Connell is a familiar face to Irish Instagram users for her tongue-in-cheek videos of midwives and public health nurses moving around shocked new mothers.<\/p>\n
Her health professional persona is so convincing that she is regularly assumed to be a midwife or nurse herself, but the character is rooted in her own experiences of new motherhood and postnatal depression.<\/p>\n
Now, she has joined forces with the National Women\u2019s Council of Ireland<\/a> to call for better mental health care for new mothers, specifically the establishment of a mother and baby psychiatric unit.<\/p>\n In this wee’s episode of the Deirdre O’Shaughnessy Podcast<\/a>, she speaks openly about her unexpected pregnancy at a time when her life was already in turmoil, wandering the streets of Bray with her new baby and eventually seeking counselling from Nurture<\/a>.<\/p>\n A psychiatric admission years later made her realise she had never dealt with the pain and trauma she had experienced as a new mother, while the experiences of a friend she met in hospital showed her the difficulties new mothers face when seeking treatment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Comedian Laura O\u2019Connell is a familiar face to Irish Instagram users for her tongue-in-cheek videos of midwives and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[28122,110512,103,61,60,410,411,1786],"class_list":["post-642756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-podcasts-home","tag-the-deirdre-o-shaughnessy-podcast","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-parenting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}