Matrescence: You’re Not Falling Apart. You’re Becoming.
There is a word for what happens to a woman when she becomes a mother—and it is not postpartum depression, not baby blues, not “the adjustment period.” It is matrescence: a developmental process as profound, disorienting, and biologically driven as adolescence, except that nobody talks about it the way they should. This post explores what the science now tells us about the maternal brain, the maternal body, and the maternal identity—and why having a name for this might be one of the most useful things we can offer the people living through it.
Therapists have the poetry, but prescribers need the math: what therapists should know about psychiatric medication.
Every week, therapists sit with clients who are on psychiatric medication — holding the most detailed, continuous picture of how that medication is actually going. They hear about the side effect that showed up in week two. They notice when the affect has gone flat in a way that feels different from the depression. They know about the ibuprofen for the back pain, the supplement someone started taking, the doses that got skipped during the work trip. And most of them have no idea what to do with any of it — not because they don’t care, but because nobody ever taught them that this information was clinically urgent, or how to move it across the treatment team in a way that actually changes care. This post is about that gap.
The Praxis Standard: Elevating Mental Health Care Through Thoughtful, Integrated Mental Health Care
This article explores the Praxis Signature Framework, our model of elevated mental health care that integrates advanced psychiatric expertise with depth-oriented psychotherapy to deliver highly personalized, evidence-based treatment. Moving beyond routine medication management, we emphasize continuous reassessment, patient education, and shared decision-making to foster meaningful therapeutic progress. This journal entry highlights, through a case reflection, the importance of evaluating treatment effectiveness and discussing milestones in care. This entry underscores the need for clinicians to remain actively engaged in their patients’ mental health journeys. The Praxis Mental Health approach combines individualized, data-informed treatment plans with clear patient education and responsive support from the multidisciplinary team, including registered nurses. Our model exemplifies a higher standard of psychiatric and therapeutic care, aiming to empower patients and improve long-term outcomes through collaboration, curiosity, and compassionate care.
