Perinatal Mental Health: Reducing Harm and Improving Response in the Field
This training is open to WA state professionals who serve perinatal families in WA state. Priority registration for professionals serving Clallam/Jefferson Counties.
This training invites participants to learn how to identify and respond to the emotional and mental health complexities during the transition to parenthood. Learn strategies for identifying what type of interventions are needed and what supports are available. This training is intended for professionals in any field of work to better serve parents in the community.
Date: Tuesday, June 9, 2026
Time: 9am-4pm PT
Location: Zoom
Cost: FREE
Trainers: Maggie Bolton, CNM, PMHNP-BC and Ash Choi, LMHC, PMH-C
Learning Objectives:
- Recognize common perinatal mental health presentations
- Distinguish baby blues from clinical illness and from psychiatric emergencies
- Understand what may be happening in the brain and body
- Respond in a way that reduces shame, escalation, and avoidable separation
- Know when the ER is necessary, and when a safer/community option may be better
Register Now
Continuing Education:
- 5.5 CEUs pending for LICSW, LMHC, LMFT
- 5.5 Contact Hours approved for RNs: Provider approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing, Provider Number 17084 for 5.5 contact hours.
This free training is offered by Perinatal Support WA through a grant from Strengthening Families Washington at the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF).
This is a live training and will not be recorded. Questions regarding the training, please email: training@perinatalsupport.org
About the Trainers:
Maggie Bolton, CNM, PMHNP-BC, brings more than two decades of experience supporting families through life’s most profound transitions. For 20 years, she practiced as a midwife, walking alongside birthing people and their families with compassion, clinical expertise, and a deep respect for the transformative journey of becoming a parent. Building on this foundation, Maggie is now a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, expanding her scope to provide holistic, trauma-informed, and evidence-based mental health care. Her clinical focus includes perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, reproductive transitions, and the unique mental health needs of families navigating pregnancy, postpartum, and early parenthood. She also works closely with Opal Food and Body Wisdom supporting people in their journey to a healthy relationship with food. Maggie’s lifelong commitment is to ensure that no family feels alone in the transition to parenthood. She is passionate about integrating physical and mental health, bridging gaps in care, and advocating for comprehensive support systems that honor the complexity of perinatal experiences.
Ash Choi is a Washington State-licensed mental health counselor (LMHC) and certified perinatal mental health specialist (PMH-C). But the path here was anything but linear.
Before becoming a clinician, I built careers in higher education and technology. Coming to this work as a second act means I carry an uncommon set of lenses: I’ve navigated complex organizational systems, the tech world’s “move fast and break things” ethos, and the perennial tension between work and life. That breadth has given me a richer understanding of the many roles we inhabit simultaneously — and what it costs us to carry them all.
My clinical experience spans community mental health with high-risk youth and families, a partial hospitalization eating disorder program, private practice with children through couples, and three years as a behavioral health provider embedded within Swedish Ballard OB/GYN & Midwifery — a role I returned to four months postpartum, fresh off my own delivery.
That return deepened something already growing in me. Over time, one chapter of human experience kept calling me back: the perinatal period, and everything it quietly demands of the people living through it. My own experiences with pregnancy, labor, delivery, and early parenthood made something unmistakably clear: the standard model of perinatal care misses too much. Common is not the same as ordinary — and treating it as one leaves people navigating some of the most significant terrain of their lives with inadequate maps and insufficient company.
Tether grew from the decision to build something larger than a single therapy practice. Beyond direct care, I consult, speak, and contribute as a subject-matter expert for organizations ranging from schools and local organizations to large health systems and Fortune 500 companies.
I live in Seattle with my wife, our kids, and our pets. I identify as nonbinary, am a birthing parent to our three-year-old, and a stepparent to our thirteen-year-old. We are, simultaneously and enthusiastically, in the thick of toddlerhood and the teen years — which, as it turns out, is its own form of continuing education.
