Medical Student, MS2
UMass Chan Medical School
My name is Abigail Howell and I am a second year medical student at the University of Massachusetts T.H. Chan School of Medicine. I graduated from Georgetown University in 2022 with a Bachelor's of Arts in Psychology. I am interested in going into pediatrics or obsetrics/gynecology. I currently lead a medical student group called Mentoring for Young Mothers. This group leads weekly health education groups to young moms aged 15-22 who are experiencing housing insecurity. Through this role, I have seen the role of postpartum mood disorders and interaction with WIC, SNAP, and MassHealth. As such, I was interested in pursuing this project using the PRAMS database in order to analyze further the rates of screening in individuals on WIC in the perinatal period. Pregnant individuals on WIC have been demonstrated to be at higher rates of postpartum depression and I wanted to analyze how healthcare providers are performing in screening for such important mental health disorders.