Nitzia Logothetis at the Concordia Annual Summit: Why Women's Mental Health Can No Longer Be a Side Conversation
Seleni Co-founder and Chair Nitzia Logothetis, MSc, MA, LMHC, delivered remarks at the Concordia Annual Summit during UNGA Week in New York City, as part of The Women's Table, a networking breakfast designed to cultivate connection and build momentum around gender equity in policy and business leadership.
Joined by an extraordinary group of women leaders from across sectors, she spoke openly about the personal experience that led her to co-found Seleni, and why the need for specialized mental health care for women remains as urgent as ever.
She began by reflecting on a formative moment early in her career, when, as a clinical intern at a nonprofit mental health clinic in New York, she was told she could use her three weeks of vacation as maternity leave. What struck her was not only the inadequacy of that response, but the contradiction it represented. She was working in a field dedicated to understanding vulnerability and the deep connection between a parent's wellbeing and a child's. And yet the profound psychological transition of becoming a mother was being treated as though very little was happening. That contradiction became part of the impetus for founding Seleni.
From there, her address turned to the scale of what is still being missed. One in five women experiences a perinatal mental health condition, and eighty percent go untreated. One in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage. Seven million couples experience depression and anxiety related to infertility. And yet all of these conditions are treatable. The gap is not in the science. It is in the recognition, the training, and the care systems that are still not built to reach women where they are.
"Care cannot depend entirely upon the suffering person diagnosing herself and finding her own way to our door. We need to become better at recognizing when she needs us."
The closing remarks made clear that women's mental health is not only a clinical or family issue. It is an economic one. One major U.S. analysis estimated approximately $14 billion in costs from untreated perinatal mood and anxiety disorders associated with a single year's births.
"We cannot speak seriously about women's participation in the economy while treating women's mental health as a separate conversation." It is a call to action that sits at the heart of everything Seleni does, and a reminder that when we invest in a mother's wellbeing, the benefits reach far beyond her, through her children, her family, and the generations that follow.
