I am Janarra Anderson, a wife and Mother of 4.

I’m also a Birth and postpartum doula, Perinatal mental health coach and Maternal Guide. And a mother who almost did not make it through her first postpartum year.

I say that plainly because I think it matters.

My first birth was traumatic. What followed was severe postpartum depression — including a season of self-harm that I carried in silence while everyone around me thought I was handling it.

I was not handling it.

I was surviving it. Alone. Without language for what was happening to me. Without a system that was designed to catch me before I fell through.

That experience plus nearly a decade of sitting with mothers in their most vulnerable postpartum moments, is what taught me something the healthcare system is still catching up to.

Maternal mental health crises are not personal failures.

They are what happens when the support structures around mothers collapse and nobody builds them back.

I founded Ina Postpartum Collective to change that.

Not just for individual mothers — though that work matters deeply to me — but at the systems level. Closing the gap between screening and support. Bringing the matrescence framework into clinical care. Building referral pathways that actually reach the mothers who need them most — including Filipina mothers, immigrant mothers, and Black and brown mothers who have been failed by the system longest.

This work is personal.

It is also structural.

And I believe those two things belong together.