I told you last week, or was it the week before (I'm so confused) that I've incorporated Postpartum Progress as a non-profit. Yippee! When you have a non-profit, you need a board of directors. That's a scary thought. You've got to ask busy, accomplished people if they want to associate themselves with you, and hope they aren't horrified by the request. Needless to say, there was a lot of heart pounding on my part. Not only that, but there are so many people I could ask, and I had to narrow it down to just a handful. So I tried to think about my focus here, which will be on using social media and technology to get women connected to the information and help they need for perinatal mood and anxiety disorders. I wanted people who understand these illnesses, who either treat them or have had one themselves. I wanted a diverse group — people who use their voices, people who are smart and accomplished, people who have ideas, people who care about women, and people who can teach me a boatload.

I can NOT believe the following amazing women said yes — I'm tripping all over myself with how humbled I am. I imagine the list might grow by another couple of folks, but for now, voila, please say hello to the first board of directors of Postpartum Progress, Inc. (listed in alphabetical order):

Morra Aarons Mele

Founder, Women Online

Morra Aarons Mele is the founder of Women Online, a digital PR and marketing firm. She is an Internet marketer who has been working with women online since 1999. She helped Hillary Clinton log on for her first Internet chat, and launched Wal-Mart’s first blog. She blogs for BlogHer.com, Huffington Post, MomsRising and Guardian.co.uk. She has covered events from the White House to the campaign trail to Yale and Harvard Law Schools in her role as a blogger on women, politics, and work. Morra is the author of “Women and Leadership in the Digital Age,” part of the upcoming Sage Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership.

Ms. Mele’s Internet experience spans politics and the private sector. During the 2004 Presidential Election, Morra was the Director of Internet Marketing for the Democratic National Committee. After the 2004 election she founded Edelman’s digital public affairs team where she worked with Fortune 50 clients. Morra worked in various roles at leading online companies, including iVillage.com, and at iVillage UK, where she managed public relations and marketing. Morra has degrees from Harvard’s Kennedy School and Brown University. She has a toddler son, another on the way, and lives near Boston. She is a survivor of antenatal depression.

Catherine Connors

Her Bad Mother

Catherine Connorsis a mother, writer and recovering academic in Toronto who traded the lecture hall for the playroom and discovered that university students and preschoolers have much the same attention span. She’s the author of HerBadMother.com, the co-founder and editor of the Bad Moms Club, the featured parenting blogger at Beliefnet, the moderator of Her Bad Mother’s Basement, a contributing editor at BlogHer, and — deep breath — the co-founder of Canada Moms Blog. In her spare time, she practices talking about herself in the third person. She’s getting pretty good at it.

She’s done some awesome stuff, including but not limited to giving birth, twice – once in a truck, almost, and with no epidural, a story that she totally plans to twist into on the back of a turnip truck with a tequila-soaked clasped in mouth by the time the boy is in his teens – meeting Grover, and being held captive on a Greek Island. She wants to do more, because there’s still Elmo, and Madagascar.

She really does believe that bad is the new good. She wrote a Manifesto. She’s that committed.

Her Bad Mother has been mentioned in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the American Prospect, the London Times, and sundry other publications, as well as on CNN, ABC, CBC and the BBC online. Babble.com named Her Bad Mother one of the top ten mommy blogs of 2009 in its list of the year’s Top 50 Mommybloggers, ranking it among the Best Written, Most Confessional, Most Controversial, Most Popular and – drum roll – Funniest mom blogs on the Internet. So, you know. If they say so.

Ms. Connors lives in the Toronto area and is a survivor of postpartum depression.

Marlene F. Freeman, MD

Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Freeman is a member of the faculty of the Perinatal and Reproductive Psychiatry Program at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Women’s Mental Health. Her clinical research is focused on mood disorders in women and integrative medicine, with particular emphasis on mood disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum. The focus of her clinical work is consultation around the treatment of mood and anxiety disorders in women planning for pregnancy or for women who are pregnant or postpartum.

She completed her undergraduate degree at University of Wisconsin and medical school at Northwestern University Medical School. She completed residency at the Harvard Longwood Psychiatry Residency Program and a research fellowship in the Biological Psychiatry Program at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, focused on bipolar disorder treatment research.

Dr. Freeman established and directed the University of Arizona’s Women’s Mental Health Program from 2000-2007. In 2007, she relocated to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center to establish a new Women’s Mental Health Center. She has been at Massachusetts General Hospital since 2008. For the past ten years, she has chaired the annual Women’s Mental Health Symposium in Tucson, Arizona, which is a conference for multidisciplinary professionals and the public.

She is Vice Editor-in-Chief for The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. She chaired the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Task Force on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, subcommittee on Omega-3 Fatty Acids in Psychiatry, and is a member of the APA’s workgroup on Major Depressive Disorder treatment guidelines. She is on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology (ASCP) and is an Associate Member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP).

Deborah Forhan Rimmler
Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Nexant Inc.

Ms. Rimmler is Nexant's general counsel, responsible for the company's contracts, legal, and corporate communications services. She began her tenure with Nexant as a consultant for World Bank and USAID-funded energy efficiency projects in Southeastern Europe before joining Nexant's in-house legal team. She previously worked as a legal and management consultant to the France Growth Fund, a closed-end mutual fund listed on the New York Stock Exchange. She began her career as an attorney in the General Counsel's office of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) in Washington, D.C. While there, she became the director of business development for the Caspian Finance Center, a regional project office located in Ankara, Turkey combining the efforts of USTDA, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

Ms. Rimmler has an LL.M. in international and comparative law from Georgetown University, a J.D. from Southwestern University, and a B.A. in political science from Boston College. She is a survivor of postpartum depression.

Susan Dowd Stone, MSW, LCSW

Blue Skye Consulting LLC

Susan Dowd Stone, MSW, LCSW is an award-winning psychotherapist, author, advocate and mental health, and former president ofPostpartum Support International. She is an NJHSS Certified Perinatal Mood Disorders Instructor, and an Adjunct Lecturer in the MSW program at the Silver School of Social Work, New York University, where she presents on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Interpersonal Psychotherapy.

Ms. Stone received her MSW from New York University where she was the recipient of a President’s Service Award. Additional and recent awards include The Mental Health Association Golden Bell Award,the Logan Leadership Award and the Hudson Perinatal Consortium Community Partner Award.
Ms. Stone is a frequent author and cited resource on the topic of perinatal mental health; recent writings include Perinatal and Postpartum Mood Disorders: Perspectives and Treatment Guide for the Healthcare Practitioner (Stone & Menken, eds, Springer, 2008) and a chapter on the treatment of perinatal mood disorders in a graduate textbook entitled Cognitive Behavior Therapy in Clinical Social Work Practice, the first of its kind for social work (Ronen & Freeman, Springer, 2006).

Additionally, she is a public reviewer for the National Institute of Mental Health and an Executive National Board Member of Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies.

Ms. Stone maintains a private practice in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, called Blue Skye Consulting LLC, specializing in women’s reproductive mental health across the life cycle, trauma treatment, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Interpersonal Psychotherapy, DBT and EMDR.

Jenifer Zeigler

Global Brand & Marketing Strategist

Jenifer Zeigler most recently served as Senior Vice President, global brand management, for InterContinental Hotels & Resorts. The InterContinental brand comprises 160 luxury properties in more than 60 countries and is part of IHG, the world’s most global hotel company and the largest by number of rooms.

Based at the company’s global headquarters in London, Zeigler was responsible for the development of brand strategy and marketing for IHG’s flagship brand, InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, including the brand’s worldwide advertising and promotion activities. During her 4 years in the role, Zeigler drove brand and property development growing from 133 properties in 2005 to 160 in 2009 with more than 50 new hotels in the pipeline. She created IHG’s first global brand management structure, orchestrating development of a global team in 3 continents.

Prior to her move to London, Zeigler led IHG’s Holiday Inn Express brand in North America, where she was responsible for brand marketing and business strategies for 1,350 hotels. Under her leadership, the brand achieved record growth in occupancy and revenue during the 2003 and 2004 fiscal years and won four coveted Effie awards for the Stay Smart^® brand advertising campaign.

Featured in Brandweek magazine as one of their “Top 10 Marketers of the Next Generation,” Zeigler’s career has been focused principally on consumer brand management and strategic marketing. Before joining IHG, Zeigler was Director of Marketing for The Coca-Cola Company’s USA Fountain division, where she was responsible for brand and portfolio strategy development as well as new product development. In this role, she developed and led the Coca-Cola Classic marketing efforts. Zeigler also served as Associate Director of global strategic marketing for The Coca-Cola Company where she was responsible for strategic marketing leadership and financial responsibility for the company’s regional soft drink and water brands worldwide. Zeigler also spent six years with Procter & Gamble, where she held profit and loss responsibility for three of the company’s leading dishwashing liquid brands, with combined net sales of $285MM. Ms. Zeigler earned a Bachelor of Science degree in English and Communications at the University of Miami, Florida. Ms. Zeigler is a mother of two and lives in the Atlanta area.