It’s the moment, she thinks, to use her public voice for good. So Dr. Jay has decided to join the medical board of a science-backed parenting platform, Riley, in order to help bring its suite of mental-health support resources to more parents nationwide. The app, which was previously only available in beta mode via a waitlist, is open to the public as of Wednesday.
Amanda DeLuca founded Riley in November 2023 after her own experience with postpartum depression. When DeLuca, a former Etsy and NerdWallet product lead, was in the throes of her mental-health struggle following the 2022 birth of her daughter, she recalls spending hours doomscrolling the internet, simmering in her myriad anxieties of what could happen to her baby.
It’s not an uncommon experience—many moms admit spending way too much time googling their fears plus using Reddit, then spiraling down a rabbit hole of toxicity that makes their condition worse, not better. What Riley aims to do, DeLuca tells me, is provide a science-based, all-in-one parental advisory platform to provide support that reduces the mental load of constant optimization and worry.
“What you should be getting out of using the app is just more joyful time with your children and feeling more confident, making good decisions, and spending quality time with them,” DeLuca tells me.
Or, more plainly, helping parents to put down their phones. It’s one of the things that Dr. Jay sees in her practice that she wants to help alleviate.
“As a clinician, I hear so many patients contend with the constant work of trying to sort through the entire internet’s worth of knowledge about parenting,” she says. “Then they get to a point where they’re too exhausted to do anything with the information, and they’ve also lost a lot of time and either maintained or amplified their own anxieties in the constant searching. Getting a good clear answer that you can do something with, and is in conversation with whatever you are still tracking about your baby, frees you up to get back to the important work that will never be replaced by an app, which is parenting.”
Speaking publicly about these issues, Dr. Jay thinks, is a first step to determining what this next phase of her life will look like. She grows most passionate when speaking about the myriad of crises facing her patients and American mothers at large, noting that our country currently has “maternal mortality and morbidity rates, especially for women of color, that are unconscionable.”
Even with all of her resources and privilege, Jay says, when she gave birth to her son she was not always believed when she talked about what she was experiencing in her own body. In the hospital, she repeatedly told her medical team that she felt something was wrong, only to be told she simply had a headache from the dry hospital air. She actually had preeclampsia, a dangerous and serious pregnancy complication.
To Dr. Jay, something needs to change, starting with making our health care system “more responsive to the full complexity of pregnancy.” It will not only make women safer; it will also make them better mothers.
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