New dads get postpartum depression, too, study finds
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What if Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have a baby ... and Tom’s the one who gets postpartum depression?
That’s not just a fantasy for those outraged at Cruise’s comments in June about the illness. It’s entirely possible.
With Hollywood-perfect timing, on June 25 - one day after Cruise and “Today” co-host Matt Lauer had their infamous on-air spat about post-birth depression, psychiatry and medication - the British medical journal The Lancet published the results of a groundbreaking study:
Fathers can develop depression after the birth of a baby and its arrival home.
What’s more, says the University of Oxford report, postpartum depression (PPD) in fathers doubles the risk that the child later will have behavioral problems, especially if the child is a boy.
“Postnatal depression is a public-health concern for mothers, fathers and babies,” says Dr. Thomas O’Connor, the University of Rochester psychiatry professor who helped research the study.
“It affects 10 to 15 percent of mothers, and while we still don’t know how common it is for dads here, even if it’s a fraction of that, it’s still affecting babies.”
How the new fathers wound up depressed is one question.
Whether their suffering will ever be taken seriously - given how many depressed new mothers still aren’t - is another.
Family matter
As cited in The Lancet report, at the start of the 1990s, researchers already knew several things about parental influences on offspring:
• Parental depression in any form can cause problems for children.
• Quality of parenting during a child’s first year can have long-term effects on the child’s social, mental and physical development.
• A mother’s postpartum depression impairs her ability to care for the child, which later disturbs the child’s development.
Fathers play a crucial role in a child’s development, and teens with depressed fathers have higher rates of mental illness.
But the early years between a father and a child remained something of a mystery. Did infants with depressed fathers have higher rates of mental illness or other issues?
“The thinking behind our study was, we know depression exists in fathers. We know PPD impairs the mother-child relation in a way that is (damaging) for the child. So, was that also the case with Dad?” O’Connor explains.
“We wanted to see if his depression alone impaired the child’s development - in addition to the way it could affect (that development) because his depression was causing him to not support the mother.”
In 1991 and 1992, a research team analyzed questionnaires and psychological tests done on 8,431 fathers, 11,833 mothers and 10,024 children in the Bristol region of England.
Tested at eight weeks after birth, again about two years later and a final time when the children were 3 to 5 years old, up to 7 percent of fathers reported low moods, feelings of sadness, irritability and hopelessness.
More alarming were the long-term effects:
By preschool age, “We saw emotional problems, disruptive problems, fearful behaviors, over-reactive behaviors,” says O’Connor. “We know this happens for boys and girls when the mom has PPD. But if we’re talking about a dad’s PPD, the effects were stronger on boys.” And, it remained noticeable even after the mother’s and father’s depressions had been controlled.
Why Dad?
Precisely why and how new fathers wind up with postpartum depression isn’t clear.
Increased expectations, decreased sleep, confusion over his role, increased responsibilities if the mother is ill or depressed, and weeks and months of general upheaval can be contributing factors, O’Connor notes, especially in men who are predisposed toward depression.
The Oxford study’s results also don’t surprise Dr. Shaila Kulkarni Misri. The Canadian reproductive psychiatrist’s research on another relatively unexplored topic - depression during pregnancy - was published in “Pregnancy Blues” (Delacorte, $23) last month.
“I think this was a brilliant study, because these men could not have suffered the same hormonal and chemical imbalances that new mothers face, yet they felt the same symptoms and sadness and depression,” says Misri.
“This is opening society’s eyes to the possibility that men are also very vulnerable at this time. And, we hope, it gives men the signal to watch for this, and to report to their doctors or others what they’re feeling.”
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