A new report on Black maternal mental health has surfaced findings that are difficult to set aside: among 527 Black women who reported experiencing mental health difficulties during pregnancy or the postnatal period, only 34% described their overall mental health support experience as good, according to Patient Safety Learning‘s summary of the research. The data comes from the 2025 Black Maternity Experiences survey by Five X More CIC, the UK’s leading grassroots organisation committed to improving Black maternal outcomes, and is presented here by its co-founder, Tinuke Awe.
The conversation around Black maternal health has long been anchored to physical survival, and for good reason. The last MBRRACE report found that Black women are still 2.7 times more likely to die in pregnancy, childbirth and the six-week period after birth compared to white women. What this new data insists upon is that the emergency does not end where the physical statistics stop.
What the Black Maternal Mental Health Survey Found
Of the 527 respondents who reported mental health difficulties, 62% reported experiencing a mental health problem across the maternity journey. Of those, 66% experienced difficulties during pregnancy and 71% during the postnatal period. The overlap matters: these are not two discrete populations. Some women arrived at their maternity care with pre-existing conditions; for others, pregnancy itself became the trigger; for others still, it was the period after birth that proved hardest. The implication is that mental health cannot be treated as a box to tick at one appointment and then filed away.
The gap between experiencing a mental health problem and receiving any formal acknowledgement of it is where the data becomes particularly troubling. Only 53 respondents received a clinical diagnosis. Women described having their concerns minimised or dismissed outright, including being told that their sadness was entirely normal, only to discover later that they were depressed. There is something corrosive about that specific failure: a woman knows something is wrong, names it, and is sent home reassured. The reassurance, in this context, functions as a closed door.
Barriers to Care and a Pattern of Omission
The structural picture that emerges from the Five X More Black Maternity Experiences report 2025 is one of consistent omission. 88% of women never saw a mental health midwife. 61% were not referred to or signposted to any support. 56% were not told how to access emergency mental health support. And, according to Patient Safety Learning’s summary of the findings, 53% said they had never been asked about suicidal thoughts during their maternity care at all.
That last figure deserves to sit on its own for a moment. Asking about suicidal ideation is a basic, established part of perinatal mental health screening. Its absence is not an oversight that belongs to individual practitioners alone; it points to something more systemic in how these women’s care is being structured, or failing to be structured.
Many women, the report found, relied on friends and family to fill the gap. Informal networks are not nothing. They can carry a person through a crisis when formal systems have left the door locked. But they are not clinical care, and framing them as a substitute misreads both what they can offer and what the women actually need.
The report also recorded that 28% of respondents described experiencing discrimination during their maternity care, and of those, 25% attributed it specifically to race. Separately, 23% of Black women said they did not receive the pain relief they requested, and 40% of those women were given no explanation for the refusal. These findings sit alongside the mental health data not as separate concerns but as part of a single, cumulative account of care that repeatedly failed to take these women seriously.
Awe’s framing is precise on this point: the issue is not whether mental health conditions exist among Black women during and after pregnancy. The data confirms that they do, at scale. The question is whether there is a route to support when it is needed, and for the majority of women in this survey, the answer was no. Five X More’s call is for emotional wellbeing to be treated as a core component of maternity care across the entire journey, not an optional addendum to the physical.
The 2025 Black Maternity Experiences survey report is available in full via Five X More.
