Target audience: 100% moms (several of the attendees are the top social media influences in the parenting space)

The Postpartum Progress® Warrior Mom Conference will take place in Boston, MA, the weekend of July 11-12, 2015. This event is a gathering of mothers from across the country who have survived perinatal mood and anxiety disorders like postpartum depression (PPD) and are ready to begin actively and powerfully raising awareness of maternal mental health in their communities.

One in every seven mothers – nearly 1 million moms in the US each year -- will get a perinatal mood or anxiety disorder. These include PPD, postpartum anxiety, postpartum PTSD (birth trauma), postpartum OCD and depression or anxiety during pregnancy. That's more women than get breast cancer annually.

Things you should know about maternal mental illness:
• The majority of ever-depressed women have their 1st episode of depression during their 1st postpartum year.
• Only 15% of moms with PPD and related illnesses ever get professional help. That means there are hundreds of thousands of American moms each year who have not gotten any help.
• The National Research Council reports that untreated PPD is associated with impaired mother-infant bonding and long-term negative effects on the child’s emotional behavior and cognitive skills, lasting into adolescence and adulthood.
• The Urban Institute says the biggest tragedy of this illness is that it is treatable and thus we could be preventing the damage it has on so many children.
• The annual cost of lost income and productivity in the US of not treating mothers with depression is $4-5 billion.

The Warrior Mom Conference will empower its attendees (all moms from throughout the US) to bring about change in their communities by raising awareness, reducing stigma and garnering community support for better support and services for new mothers. The more we do these things, the more we forever change the lives of the families affected by maternal mental illness.

Postpartum Progress is a 501c3 national non-profit with a mission to improve the health and wellbeing of women and children by increasing awareness of postpartum depression and all other mental illnesses related to pregnancy and childbirth, and improving access to and quality of maternal mental health support for pregnant and new mothers. Our goal is to double awareness of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders in the next 5 years. To see what we were up to in 2013, visit http://postpartumprogress.org/2013-impact-report/.