We developed this program that I referred to before. It was inspired by mothers and babies and is evidence-based worldwide but stems from Palo Alto in the U.S. We adapted it to call it Toi, Moi, Bébé. One of the first couple of modules is really that. We made these kinds of cartoons, and we were addressing a lot of societal, universal golden rules of how people experience transition to parenthood.
It's not the same for everyone. I think a lot of the time there are these social standards that are sometimes perpetuated by what we see more actively in the media; therefore, I think this is very helpful. We've had people we've worked with test out the intervention at the very early stages in terms of feasibility and acceptability. That's one of the things they would point out. I felt so relieved to see a woman who was experiencing pregnancy in a positive light, where it was very challenging and it was not a joyful moment, but then there was also representation of me.
To get to your second question, until we know the why, there's nothing that prevents us from having these types of interventions available, because they do seem to help and they're easily accessible in our province, for example, online.
The other piece is that there are studies like ours, the Montreal antenatal well-being study, where we're looking for certain biomarkers, neural or endocrine. For sure there is something happening. We know that there are specific profiles of women who are more vulnerable; therefore, when we're talking here, it's more about women's health more generally. Preconception care, for example, brings about this opportunity, if we were to identify these biomarkers in combination with dialogue and picking up on certain things that are being mentioned by the pregnant people, to also have these more medical base biomarkers.
As a clinical psychologist, I see that people who are not expecting often neglect their well-being. We're all like that. We know what a healthy lifestyle is, but we don't necessarily live it.
Where pregnancy presents as an opportunity, for women but also men, is that, all of a sudden, I'm preparing to care not only for myself but also for my offspring. There's something that happens at the cognitive and motivational levels that people want to seek help for. Why not leverage this added motivation to get people to talk about mental health and how they can do a self-reflection at that moment to improve themselves, according to not a curative approach but a more preventative one?
We've already heard stats from Dr. Ryan Van Lieshout about the seven dollars for every dollar invested. This goes back to Dr. Heckman, who mentioned this in 2000. If we were to invest one dollar in prevention, it would save us seven dollars in terms of curative care later on.
This is what we need to keep in mind. There is an opportunity to use those motivational aspects to get people to want to get better.