Workplace Barriers to Lactation for Mental Health Clinicians

Lactation provides an important source of nutrition for infants, and physician parents desire to provide human milk to their babies. There are established barriers to workplace lactation for other groups of physicians, but no existing literature for psychiatrists, psychologists, or other psychotherapists.

We disseminated a survey of demographics, experiences with gestation and lactation, and exposure to a variety of categorical and specific external barriers to workplace lactation for mental health clinicians.

Of 235 survey completers who had lactated anywhere from under 6 months to over 5 years, 98.7% had experienced barriers to workplace lactation. The most common external barriers were insufficient time (85.1%), lack of dedicated space (59.4%), nowhere to store milk (51.9%), and inflexibility of schedule (48.6%). Difficulty with supply was also a significant barrier (54.8%). Barriers that negatively impacted achieving a self-set lactation duration goal were hospital-grade pump (p = 0.013), medical, pregnancy, and parental leave problems (p = 0.001), parental leave insufficient to establish supply (p = 0.000), and problems with supply or mastitis (p = 0.017). Only parental leave and medical problems were significant on multivariable analysis (p = 0.002).

Similar to other clinicians, mental health professionals face significant barriers to lactation at work. More research in this area is needed. We provisionally recommend thoughtful and well-equipped lactation suites to mitigate this issue, improving worker wellness and the ability of lactating parents to return to the clinical workforce.