Articles on psychotherapy, emotional wellbeing and personal change

Becoming a mother changes a woman at every level: body, brain, relationships and sense of self. There is a word for this transition to motherhood: matrescence. Coined by the anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s and brought into wider public conversation by the writer Lucy Jones in her book Matrescene, it names a developmental passage as profound as adolescence. Yet maternal mental health during this passage has been strangely neglected, hidden behind the comfortable idea that motherhood is simply ‘natural’.