By: Raymond K. Baxey, APR
A mother may have a healthy baby, receive congratulations from family and friends and appear to be doing well, yet quietly struggle with anxiety, persistent sadness, sleeplessness or emotional distress. Because motherhood is often associated with happiness and fulfilment, such experiences can remain hidden, leaving some women to suffer without seeking help.
Ghana’s new Maternal Mental Health Policy 2026–2037 seeks to bring such often-overlooked experiences into the country’s maternal healthcare agenda. But while the policy establishes an important framework for addressing maternal mental health, communication scholar Balkisa M. Sissy believes its success will ultimately depend on whether women and the communities they live in have a meaningful role in shaping its implementation.
The policy identifies maternal mental health as a significant but under-prioritised public-health concern. It cites evidence suggesting that between 32 and 50 per cent of pregnant and postpartum women in Ghana experience conditions including anxiety, antenatal and postpartum depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, while fewer than 10 per cent of affected women receive professional support.
The figures point to a substantial gap between the need for maternal mental-health support and access to professional care. For Sissy, however, closing that gap requires more than expanding clinical services.
A PhD student in Communication at George Mason University, Sissy researches health communication, women’s wellbeing and the ways culture and structural inequalities shape women’s health experiences. Her work draws on the Culture-Centered Approach, which emphasises the relationship between culture, social structures and people’s capacity to influence the conditions affecting their health.
Applied to maternal mental health, the approach raises a fundamental question: should health institutions simply tell women how to recognise and manage mental-health problems, or should they first listen to women about how they experience and understand those problems?
Sissy argues for the latter.
A woman experiencing emotional distress may not describe it using clinical terminology. She may not directly talk about sleeplessness, physical discomfort, persistent crying, fear, anger, strained relationships or withdrawing from others. Her understanding of what is happening may also be shaped by family expectations, faith and cultural beliefs about motherhood.
The difference in language and understanding matters because it can influence whether a woman recognises that she needs help, whom she chooses to approach and whether she feels safe enough to disclose what she is experiencing.
“There is a difference between taking a programme ‘to’ a community and building one ‘with’ a community,” Sissy says.
For her, meaningful community participation should begin before an intervention is designed—not after policymakers have already decided what women need.
Women, she argues, possess knowledge that health institutions may not capture through clinical assessments alone. They understand the pressures surrounding motherhood, the responses they are likely to receive from family members and the circumstances that can make seeking help easier or more difficult.
This perspective is particularly relevant to Ghana’s new policy because the framework itself recognises the importance of community engagement and ownership. It calls for maternal mental health to be integrated into routine maternal healthcare and broader social protection systems, while strengthening referral pathways, healthcare-provider capacity, community support, anti-stigma initiatives, monitoring and sustainable financing.
The policy also recognises roles for traditional leaders and faith-based organisations, reflecting the reality that women’s health decisions are influenced by institutions and people beyond the formal healthcare system.
Importantly, its monitoring framework proposes focus-group discussions and interviews with mothers, healthcare providers and community members to understand barriers to care, cultural perceptions and satisfaction with maternal mental-health services.
For Sissy, however, such mechanisms must become more than a formal requirement.
“The opportunity is to make such listening central rather than ceremonial,” she argues, stressing that women should help define the problem, identify barriers to care and determine what forms of support would fit into their lives.
That does not mean rejecting medical expertise. Rather, it calls for clinical knowledge and community knowledge to work together.
“The goal is not to abandon biomedical knowledge. It is to stop treating biomedical knowledge as the only knowledge in the room,” Sissy says.
This distinction places communication at the heart of maternal mental-health policy implementation. Communication, in this context, is not simply about producing awareness campaigns, posters or messages encouraging women to seek help. It is also about creating systems in which women can speak, be heard and influence decisions affecting their well-being.
“Communication is not only what health institutions say to people. It is also how institutions create the conditions to hear people,” she says.
Ghana has therefore taken an important step by recognising maternal mental health within a national policy framework. The more difficult task now is ensuring that implementation translates that recognition into accessible, culturally centered and trusted support for women.
For Sissy, the ultimate measure of success should be whether communities have a genuine role in that process.
“Communities should not simply be the last stop for solutions created elsewhere. They should be one of the places where solutions are co-created.”
As Ghana begins implementing its maternal mental-health agenda, the question is no longer simply whether the country has a policy. It does. The more consequential question is whether the voices and experiences of the women it seeks to serve will help give that policy life.
