It’s time, she thinks, to use her public voice for good. Dr. Jay has therefore decided to join the medical council of a parental platform supported by science, Riley, in order to help bring its continuation of mental health support to more parents nationwide. The application, which was not previously available in beta mode via a waiting list, is open to the public on Wednesday.
Amanda Deluca founded Riley In November 2023 after his own experience of postpartum depression. When Deluca, a former product manager Etsy and Nerdwallet, was plagued by her struggle for mental health after the birth of her daughter in 2022, she remembers spending hours condemning the Internet, moving to her countless anxieties of what could happen to her baby.
It is not a rare experience – many mothers admit spending too much time to googler their fears and using Reddit, then taking a toxicity rabbit that worsens their condition, no better. What Riley aims to do, Deluca tells me is to provide an all-in-one parental advisory platform based on science to provide support that reduces the mental load of constant optimization and concern.
“What you should withdraw from the use of the application is just a happier time with your children and feel more confident, make good decisions and spend quality time with them,” said Deluca.
Or, more clearly, help parents lower their phone. This is one of the things that Dr. Jay sees her practice that she wants to help alleviate.
“As a clinician, I hear that so many patients compete for the constant work of trying to sort the entire Internet knowledge on parenting,” she said. “Then, they come to a point where they are too exhausted to do anything with the information, and they also lost a lot of time and have maintained or amplified their own anxieties in constant research. Get a good clear answer with which you can do something, and is in conversation with everything that you still follow on your baby, free you to get back to the important work which will never be replaced by an application, which is allowed.”
Speaking of these questions publicly, thinks Dr. Jay, is a first step to determine what this next phase of his life will look like. She becomes the most passionate when she talks about the myriad of crises with which she faces her patients and American mothers as a whole, noting that our country currently has “maternal and morbidity mortality rates, especially for women of color, which are inadmissible”.
Even with all her resources and privileges, Jay said, when she gave birth to her son, she was not always believed when she talked about what she lived in her own body. In the hospital, she said several times to her medical team that she felt that something was wrong, only to tell her that she simply had the head of the dry air. She actually had preeclampsia, a dangerous and serious complication of pregnancy.
For Dr. Jay, something should change, starting by making our health care system “more reactive to all the complexity of pregnancy”. This will not only make women safer; It will also make them better mothers.
