By Morgan Rose, chief science officer at Ema, and Lauren Scocozza, vice president of product at Willow

May is Maternal Mental Health Month, and every year it surfaces a familiar set of statistics: 1 in 5 new mothers experiences postpartum depression or anxiety, most go unscreened, and the majority who are screened don’t receive adequate follow-up care.

The conversation is important. But the numbers obscure something that anyone who has worked in this space knows to be true: postpartum mental health distress rarely arrives with a label.

It arrives as exhaustion. As “I’m not sure I’m doing this right.”

As a question about supply, pumping, whether it’s okay to feel this disconnected from something you were supposed to love immediately.

Willow integrated Ema, AI built for women’s health, with the goal of closing the maternal care and data gap.

The pattern mentioned above appears consistently in Ema’s conversational data through the Willow app.

A mother reports mastitis symptoms.

Ema walks her through the clinical presentation, confirms she should keep pumping, and then she questions if she is using her pump correctly. In the same thread, within a few exchanges, she says she’s “feeling too sad.” Then: “I don’t know. I think I’m depressed. I am not enjoying my postpartum.”

She did not come to the app to talk about her mental health.

She came about a breast infection. The mental health disclosure came through the already-opened door.

The Weight Underneath the Technical Question

New motherhood involves an enormous amount of problem-solving at a time when cognitive and emotional reserves are depleted. The pump has to work. The baby has to eat. The body has to recover.

Work comes back. Sleep doesn’t. Feeding their babies requires skill, and the learning curve sits atop it all.

What Ema’s conversation data shows is that the emotional load of navigating these challenges is not separate from mental health. It is mental health.

When a mother writes, “I’m postpartum and overwhelmed and tired,” and then, in the same breath, asks about flange sizing, she is telling us what the postpartum experience actually feels like from the inside.

The technical question and the emotional state are one and the same.

Breastfeeding carries particular weight here.

The desire to breastfeed, the guilt when it doesn’t go as planned, and the identity questions that come with feeding choices are not peripheral to the postpartum mental health conversation.

In our conversations, women navigating supply concerns often reveal deeper anxieties: about whether they are good mothers, whether their bodies are “working,” and whether the difficulty they are experiencing means something about them.

These are the signals worth asking about.

What Screening Looks Like in Practice

Ema is trained on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale and is equipped to offer the EPDS when a conversation warrants it.

The value is being present for the moment when a woman is ready to name what she’s feeling.

That moment rarely comes as a direct request for mental health support. It comes when someone is already in a conversation about something else, and something shifts.

A woman dealing with mastitis says she feels sad. A woman worried about supply says she doesn’t feel like herself. A woman managing the logistics of going back to work with a wearable pump says she’s not sure she can keep up with it all — and the “it all” isn’t about the pump.

Ema is designed to hear that. She doesn’t stay on the clinical or technical track when the conversation moves. She follows the person.

And when the moment is right, she offers the screening as a natural next step.

In one exchange, a woman was offered the EPDS after disclosing depressive feelings. She declined.

Ema acknowledged that and asked if she wanted to talk about something else. That’s the right response. The offer was made without pressure. The door stays open.

Sometimes what matters most is that someone asked at all.

The Continuity Problem

One of the most persistent structural failures in maternal mental health care is fragmentation.

A woman sees her OB at six weeks postpartum for a brief screening. She may get a call from a nurse. She may be given a referral she never follows up on because she doesn’t have the capacity to navigate a new care relationship while managing a newborn.

The clinical touchpoints are too few, too far apart, and too often siloed from one another.

The postpartum period lasts far longer than the six-week checkup implies. Mental health symptoms can emerge weeks or months after delivery, shift in character over time, and interact with physical challenges in ways that don’t fit neatly into any single provider’s lane.

A lactation concern becomes an anxiety spiral. A supply drop triggers a grief response. A difficult return to work surfaces a postpartum depression that wasn’t fully recognized at six weeks.

Ema sits inside these moments because she’s embedded in the platform women are already using. She doesn’t require a separate appointment, a referral, or the cognitive bandwidth to seek out a new resource.

She’s in the Willow app that mom is already using multiple times a day to manage her pump.

When Ema identifies a woman who may need more support than she can provide, she routes to the right resource — whether that’s a SimpliFed lactation consultant for feeding-related concerns or a clinical professional for mental health follow-up.

The conversation leads to the handoff with someone who can do more.

What the Month of May Means for the Rest of the Year

Maternal Mental Health Month is a useful moment of attention. The awareness campaigns, the social media posts, and the statistics shared in newsletters matter.

But the gap in postpartum mental health care is not really an awareness problem.

Most people in the perinatal space and beyond know the statistics. The problem is access, timing, and continuity.

AI doesn’t close that gap on its own.

What it can do is be present in the spaces where women already are, at the times when they need something, and attentive enough to recognise that a conversation about a pump, a clogged duct, or a supply concern is also a conversation about how someone is doing.

The question behind the question is often the more important one.

For Willow, the conversation data Ema generates is a map of where mothers are struggling, what they reach for when they need help, and when they are ready to say more than they came to say.

That information, used well, shapes better resources, better onboarding, and a more connected experience across the full arc of the postpartum year and beyond.

Building the infrastructure to support maternal mental health is a year-round project.

Willow is doing one part of that, and the conversations happening on the Willow platform every day are evidence that women want support that meets them where they are… in their app, in their moment, without having to ask for it twice.

About the authors

Morgan Rose is Chief Science Officer at Ema, an AI platform for women’s health. Ema partners with healthcare organisations and femtech companies to deliver clinically grounded AI support across the perinatal journey.

Lauren Scocozza is the Vice President of Product at Willow Innovations, Inc. For women by women, Willow is building a maternal care platform to address the interconnected challenges of postpartum.