The new dad blues
By Lauri Githens Hatch
Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle
| |||
 |
|
||
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 earlier this year about the illness. It's entirely possible.
With Hollywood-perfect timing, on June 25 — one day after Cruise and NBC "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 the infant's arrival home.
What's more, says the Oxford University report, postpartum depression or PPD in fathers doubles the risk that the child later will have behavioral problems, especially if the child is a boy.
"Post-natal depression is a public health concern for mothers, fathers and babies," says Dr. Thomas O'Connor, a University of Rochester psychiatry professor involved in the research.
"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 wind 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:
Fathers play a big 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. Do 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 these remained noticeable even after the parent’s depressions had been controlled.
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.
Canadian reproductive psychiatrist Dr. Shaila Kulkarni Misri, whose research on depression during pregnancy will be published in “Pregnancy Blues” (Delacorte, $23) this month, said of the Oxford study: “This is opening society’s eyes to the possibility that men are also very vulnerable at this time.
