Dr Dawn Kingston

Home
Dr Dawn Kingston

https://www.drdawnmentalhealth4women.com/research-studies I’m Dr. Dawn Kingston and I’m on a mission to help women live their best lives. I want to change this.

Dr. Dawn Kingston & The HOPE Team
Helping Women Overcome Mental Heathcare Barriers
🌼HOPE: Free selfguided therapy
📖Book: Your Brain on Pregnancy
🐑Farm in off hrs
⬇️Join a research study! My work centers on helping pregnant women take care of their mental and emotional well-being. Healthy families depend upon healthy mothers, and my goal is to help mothers be at their very best. I have two grown sons of my own, and I know firsthand that I can only support them well when I am healthy myself. As an associate professor at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, and holder of the Lois Hole Hospital for Women Cross-Provincial Chair in Perinatal Mental Health, I’m able to help pregnant women build strong emotional health and become the parent they want to be. I’ve been doing research on prenatal mental health for the past 10 years. I became seriously interested in women’s mental health during pregnancy when I was a nurse caring for sick infants in a neonatal intensive care unit. I realized that the medical field was focused on physical pregnancy problems, but some new research was linking prenatal stress, anxiety and depression to preterm birth and other health problems in children whose mothers suffered with prenatal anxiety or depression. A decade later, we now know that mental health problems are among the most common health problems in pregnancy. Unfortunately, help for emotional and mental health during pregnancy is often unavailable when and where women need it and they end up feeling alone and desperate. My goal is to share information and answers to questions that I constantly hear from women, their families and their prenatal care providers and provide bottom line, practical solutions that you can use to support your emotional health. Everything I offer will be based on our best evidence for how to prevent and treat emotional health problems in pregnancy. One last thing. The material I provide is meant to help you find the help you need to restore or maintain you mental and emotional health. As with all online health information, you should share it with your own provider before beginning any course of treatment. Warmly,
Dr. K

13/08/2025

Grounding techniques are helpful in reducing symptoms such as panic attacks, anxiety, and symptoms of trauma.

The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique is helpful for centering your mind and focusing on small physical details in your surroundings.

Try to notice details with your senses that you normally tune out as background noise.

What other grounding techniques have you tried?

08/08/2025

When you’re feeling stressed, caring for both your mental and physical health can feel hard. Here are 5 ways to recharge your body and mind when you’re feeling stressed. Even five minutes can add up and make a difference.

Wanting a little extra support? Check out cognitive behavioural therapy on the HOPE Platform. CBT offers support in changing unhelpful thoughts, emotions, and actions.

06/08/2025

‘Birth trauma’ is a broad term and can sound clinical. Putting it into context makes it more relatable and human. Here are some examples of what it can look like:

🔹A mother who experiences a traumatic birth may feel: anxious, fearful, confused and unheard.

🔹Experiencing these feelings may affect how a woman feels later, e.g. drop in confidence in a later pregnancy, anger, or extreme vigilance toward baby.

🔹Anxiety around experiencing, coping with and recovering from a traumatic birth may be made more or less difficult depending on past traumas and quality of support.

If you are struggling and suspect you may be dealing with some post birth trauma, anxiety, or postpartum depression, don’t wait. Traumatic births can lead to ongoing feelings of anxiety or depression, so it is vital that a mother’s needs are heard. ⁠ Reach out for help.

There is no one way to grieve, but many ways to grieve and process trauma. Be gentle with yourself.

22/07/2025

Hey friends! Here to make an announcement - our free mental health support platform HOPE is undergoing some upgrades. It will include a more user friendly experience and live under our HOPE team’s main website - Dr Dawn Mental Health 4 Women. This means more seamless links to resources to support you on your mental health journey while exploring screeners (e.g. for anxiety, depression and more), and self guided therapy options (such as CBT and IPT).

For more information, visit the HOPE Platform News page (link in bio). Stay tuned for a Fall 2025 refresh!

💙

09/07/2025

How do you know that what you’re experiencing is simply a mood swing or something more?

This is often the very thing that keeps women from talking to their doctors about what they’re experiencing. Prenatal appointments are really short - if you’ve only got a couple of minutes to talk to your doctor, why do you want to talk about something that you’re not sure is even an issue. So women feel afraid and concerned about raising how they’re feeling if they don’t know for sure what they’re feeling is, for example, really depression or anxiety.

In the case of depression, the key difference is mood swings are temporary, whereas depression can last for weeks, months or years. It can go away and that be the end of it, or it can cycle back round at some point.

Depression comes and goes in cycles.

Pregnancy can be a time of heightened awareness and an opportunity to reach out for help to better cope in the present and future.

Learn more on the website or in the book, ‘Your Brain on Pregnancy’.

Address

Website

http://www.hopementalhealth4women.com/, https://www.drdawnmentalhealth4women.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Dr Dawn Kingston posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Want your practice to be the top-listed Clinic?

Country:

City: