A specialist mental health clinic for expectant and new parents has opened at Berry Springs, near Darwin, marking the first service of its kind in the Northern Territory and offering a lifeline to families in a region with some of the country's most severe gaps in mental healthcare.
The clinic is run by Gidget Foundation Australia, a charity that operates 34 similar services across other states, and is jointly funded by the federal government. It will offer both face-to-face and telehealth appointments, with a target of seeing 700 patients per year. Sessions are available with Medicare subsidies, lowering the financial barrier for families seeking help.
Why the NT urgently needed a perinatal mental health service
The Northern Territory records some of the highest rates of parental depression and anxiety in Australia, yet its mental health infrastructure has long struggled to keep pace with demand. Federal government data shows the NT has the lowest availability of psychologists in the country — just 83.9 per 100,000 people, compared with 178.7 in the ACT.
The Territory also carries the nation's highest suicide rate, at 17 per 100,000 people — more than double that of eastern states, where the figure sits at 7.7 per 100,000 in the ACT.
Gidget Foundation chief executive Arabella Gibson said the scale of perinatal mental illness in the NT made the new service critical. "There's over 3,500 new births in the Territory every year, and of those parents having babies, at least 1,200 of them will be diagnosed with perinatal mental ill health, so it's really significant," she said.
Gibson noted that nationally, around 100,000 Australians are diagnosed with perinatal depression and anxiety each year — roughly one in five mothers and one in ten fathers. In the NT, she said, the numbers are even higher.
A mother's story: PTSD after a traumatic birth
Young Queensland mother-of-two Natalya Wallace knows first-hand what it means to fall through the gaps in regional mental health support. Three years ago, she suffered a uterine rupture during the birth of her second daughter — an ordeal she says she narrowly survived.
While her body healed relatively quickly, she was left with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), flashbacks, anxiety, panic attacks, sleeplessness and what she described as crushing fear. Like many women, she initially wondered whether what she was experiencing was simply the "baby blues."
"Being in rural and remote [areas], where you don't have that access straight away to healthcare, you sort of have to put up with it and think: Maybe it is baby blues?" she said. "But sometimes it's not, and you do need that extra support."
A GP eventually referred Ms Wallace to a Gidget Foundation service near her home. There, clinicians recommended Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy — a technique that uses guided eye movements or visual tracking to help the brain process traumatic memories.
"It helped me to separate the fear behind my symptoms, it helped desensitise it all," she said.
Federal funding and what comes next
The Berry Springs clinic is part of a broader national commitment to perinatal mental health. The federal government has pledged $40 million to fund more services across Australia, recognising the widespread impact of depression and anxiety on new and expectant parents.
For the NT, where specialist support has historically been sparse and communities are often geographically isolated, the combination of in-person care and telehealth is seen as essential to reaching those who need it most.
Gibson said the Medicare-subsidised model was a deliberate effort to ensure cost did not become a barrier for Territory families already navigating some of the country's most challenging circumstances.
With more than 1,200 NT parents expected to be diagnosed with perinatal mental ill health each year, the new Berry Springs service represents a significant — if still early — step toward closing a long-standing gap in care.
