By Tanesha Mondestin and Kay Matthews
A Mother’s Pain, A System’s Failure
In February 2026, Tamisha Cheyniece Drake of Lufkin, Texas, lost her newborn daughter at birth. Two months later, she returned to the cemetery where her baby had been buried, dug up the grave, and removed her daughter’s remains. She was arrested and charged with a state jail felony for abuse of a corpse. Tamisha potentially faces 180 days to two years in a state jail facility and a maximum fine of $10,000 if convicted.
News headlines describe a crime, but what many fail to describe is a grieving mother, unraveling in the complete absence of postpartum mental health support.
“A grieving mother should not be met first with handcuffs, charges, and public humiliation. She should be met with care, crisis support, and a maternal mental health team that understands the unbearable weight of infant loss.”
— Kay Matthews
Tamisha’s story is not an isolated incident. It is a mirror held up against a healthcare system that fails to prioritize Black maternal mental health. What was in place to support Tamisha Drake between the moment she left the hospital without her baby and the moment she arrived at that gravesite? For far too many Black mothers in this country, there is nothing in place to support them.
What We Know About Black Maternal Mental Health
About 20% of women are affected by maternal mental health conditions in the United States and it is the leading cause of maternal mortality. Nearly 40% of Black women experience maternal mental health conditions. Postpartum depression rates among Black women have nearly tripled over the past decade, from just over 9% in 2010 to nearly 25% in 2021. Black mothers are 46% less likely to be screened for postpartum depression and are less likely to get treatment than White women. Much of this is rooted in structural racism and discrimination. The structural racism embedded in screening, diagnosis, and treatment pathways compounds these disparities. Black women are more likely to have their pain dismissed, their symptoms attributed to other causes, and their mental health needs deprioritized in clinical encounters shaped by implicit bias and systemic inequity.
Grief following infant loss can be a trigger for postpartum mental health complications. Too often, providers see the birth outcome and stop there. Postpartum care is largely not set up to follow the mother whose baby did not come home.
The Medicaid Gap
Medicaid can do much more to drive health system changes that ensure postpartum mothers receive the mental health supports they need. Medicaid finances more than 40% of births across the United States and 48% of births in Texas. Over 60% of Black births are funded by Medicaid. It is the nation’s primary payer of maternity care. It is also the largest payer of behavioral health services. For the majority of low-income mothers, Medicaid is not just a safety net, it is the only net. Texas is one of the 10 states that have not adopted Medicaid expansion for low-income adults. Nearly 47% of Texas counties are maternity care deserts, according to the March of Dimes. Adopting the expansion would allow more Texans to get access to care, allow more women to get health needs addressed before they become pregnant, and the resulting reduction of uninsured adults and infusion of federal dollars could protect and grow needed health services, including mental health.
One of the most underutilized clinical tools is screening mothers for depression during their infant’s well-child visits. Pediatricians can bill for this under Medicaid’s EPSDT benefit in Texas and many other states. If a screening shows the need for follow-up care, Texas (and every other state but its neighbor Arkansas) has extended postpartum coverage to 12 months following the end of a pregnancy, allowing moms to get needed care during the “4th trimester” not only after a live birth but also in the case of a miscarriage or a tragedy of infant death for mothers like Tamisha. The Perinatal Psychiatry Access Network (PeriPAN) is a program in Texas designed to support clinicians who care for pregnant and postpartum patients. Doctors call PeriPAN to speak with psychiatrists to help their patients with diagnoses, medications, and treatment plans. In Texas alone, untreated maternal mental health conditions among people enrolled in Medicaid cost nearly $1 billion over the first five years of a child’s life. Despite the compelling economic case, Texas remains among the states with the largest gaps in maternal mental health providers and resources, rating a D+ in 2025 State Maternal Mental Health Report Cards.
While the policies are a start, coverage alone doesn’t translate into care that uses pediatric visits or other touchpoints to screen for or monitor maternal mental health. The health system can’t fully support the mental health needs of grieving postpartum parents until the system and its resources are incentivized and designed to provide appropriate, culturally relevant follow-up and support. Texas’ progress allowing reimbursement for maternal depression screening in children’s check-ups in 2017 and extending postpartum Medicaid extension in 2024 are meaningful steps forward, but coverage and implementation are two different things. Without culturally grounded providers, grief-informed care, community infrastructures to connect mothers to the right care at the right time, and a system that financially supports the care and connections, maternal mental health remains in a state of fragility.
The Shades of Blue Project Builds Supportive Communities and Amplifies Solutions
The Shades of Blue Project works at the intersection of direct support, community education, provider training, storytelling, and national policy advocacy to address maternal mental health disparities, particularly for Black and Brown women. It meets mothers where the clinical system has too often failed to go, especially in the moments after birth, after loss, after trauma, and during the quiet crisis of postpartum grief.
As a mother who has experienced stillbirth, I (Kay) understand firsthand the grief a mother carries after the loss of a child, to leave the hospital with empty arms, to be expected to keep functioning, and to navigate a world that often fails to recognize that grief and postpartum mental health complications are inseparable. The story of Tamisha Cheyniece Drake is not just another headline. It is a painful reminder of what happens when mothers are met with punishment instead of care.
The Shades of Blue Project is fighting for a future where no mother is discharged into silence. It is fighting for grief-informed maternal mental health care, postpartum support after loss. It is fighting for policies that recognize the emotional, physical, and financial realities of motherhood. It is fighting for systems that respond to pain with care, not criminalization.
Each year, Shades of Blue hosts Black Maternal Mental Health Week, coming up July 19 – July 25, 2026 to center the realities of Black maternal mental health and bring together mothers, providers, advocates, policymakers, birth workers, and community leaders to confront the gaps that continue to leave Black and Brown mothers unseen and unsupported. Shades of Blue also amplifies the lived experiences of mothers and birthing people through its Someone Like Me storytelling series so that more mothers recognize they are not alone. The Shades of Blue Project was also a national leader in securing federal funding for newborn supply kits through the expansion of the Newborn Essentials Support Toolkit (NEST).
What Comes Next
Tamisha’s experience is yet another alarm about the broader systemic failures that continue to leave grieving mothers without care, follow-up, and protection after pregnancy and infant loss. Grief, trauma, and untreated mental health conditions do not follow a calendar. Medicaid expansion would help close the gap for mothers who continue to need care after postpartum coverage ends.
The 12-month postpartum extension is a floor, not a ceiling. We must protect the policy and ensure it becomes a real pathway to care. There have been major implementation challenges for the 12-month postpartum extension, including a lack of awareness of coverage, role confusion as to what type of provider will continue postpartum care (primary care doctor versus OB/GYN), a shortage of mental health providers, and patients in rural areas traveling a long distance to get to appointments. Texas and states across the country must build systems where mothers who experience miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, or infant loss are never discharged without a grief-informed follow-up plan.
H.R. 1’s growing Medicaid cuts shift costs to states, making this work more challenging, but Tamisha’s story requires us to continue to sound the alarm. Protecting Medicaid, expanding maternal mental health access, reimbursing the perinatal workforce, and creating grief-informed discharge protocols are not merely good ideas. They can be life-saving interventions.
Tamisha Cheyniece Drake needed a village. So do the countless mothers who will never make the news. She needed someone to recognize the depth of her grief before it became a breaking point. She needed a grief-informed maternal mental health provider, a community health worker, a postpartum support group, a doula, a neighbor, and a system that saw her. She needed a country that treated Black maternal grief as a public health emergency.
We need policies and systems that respond to grief with support, not silence, and policies that protect mothers before they reach a breaking point.
Kay Matthews is the Founder and Executive Director of the Shades of Blue Project and creator of Black Maternal Mental Health Week (July 19–25).