Pooja Lakshmin, MD: The Tyranny of Self-Care
Pooja Lakshmin, MD is a board-certified psychiatrist specializing in women's mental health and perinatal psychiatry. Dr. Lakshmin is the founder of Gemma, the first digital education platform exclusively dedicated to women’s mental health, that provides virtual courses for mental and emotional well-being. She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, a medical advisor to Peloton, and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University School of Medicine, where she is a clinical supervisor in the Five Trimesters perinatal psychiatry clinic.
We sat down with her to talk about women’s mental health during the pandemic. The pandemic has accentuated disparities in mental health problems, as women are disproportionately responsible for childcare and other domestic tasks. Globally, women and girls are responsible for 75% of unpaid care and domestic work in homes and communities. The unequal shares of household responsibilities can lead to extra stress and burnout for women. One study reported a 60% excess of burnout in physician women compared to physician men, driven by unequal distribution of household responsibilities and expectations in the workplace. With all these expectations, women do not have time to take care of themselves.
The inequitable expectations and social isolation have contributed to worsening mental health among women during the pandemic. Since the pandemic, there has been a significant increase in self-reported levels of depression and anxiety in pregnant women. A survey of physician moms during the pandemic found that 41% of moms scored above the cutoff point for moderate anxiety, with 18% scoring above the cutoff for severe anxiety.
Dr. Lakshmin discusses the importance of women making the time to take care of themselves. While women are frequently the targets of self-care merchandise, these things are ineffective if women do not have time to spend taking care of themselves. Broken systems do not provide adequate resources for working moms to manage all their responsibilities. In an article she wrote in The New York Times, Dr. Lakshmin says “While burnout places the blame (and thus the responsibility) on the individual and tells working moms they aren’t resilient enough, betrayal points directly to the broken structures around them”.
Check out the video below to hear more from Dr. Lakshmin, and follow her on social media to continue learning more about women’s mental health.
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