Postpartum Depession and Fathers, Study with Colic

Article taken from NY Times Magazine September 19, 2009
Motherlode, Adventures in Parenting


August 14, 2009
Postpartum Depression and Fathers
By Lisa Belkin
My older son had colic. Every day at about four in the afternoon he would start to scream, and he would not calm down until eight or nine. We checked for every medical cause, tried every folk remedy, and nothing worked. If you treat colic, our pediatrician quipped, it goes away in about twelve weeks. If you don’t, it takes about three months. In other words, there’s very little you can do.
I was already weepy with what I now realize was mild post-partum depression back then, and this was not the news I wanted to hear. The whole nerve-fraying, battle-scarring experience has left me more attuned than average to news about either colic or post-partum depression, though, and earlier this summer an article in the journal Pediatrics wrapped the two topics into one study. Researchers at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, surveyed 4,426 expectant couples when the mothers were 20 weeks pregnant, and found that 12 percent of fathers and 11 percent of mothers showed symptoms of depression at that point.
Then, when the babies were two months of age, the researchers tallied parental reports of “excessive crying.” Twice as many of the depressed fathers (4.1 percent) and mothers (4.8 percent) had infants who cried for three or more hours a day (a definition of colic) than the non-depressed parents (2.2 percent of both non-depressed mothers and fathers.)
The “news” here? That Dad’s mental health can affect a newborn. Previous studies have looked almost entirely at Mom’s mental health. The advice? That parents-to-be of either gender might be well served by addressing signs of depression before a baby is born.
“It is likely that a substantial part of the fathers who were depressed during pregnancy were depressed after childbirth as well. In this respect, one could imagine that fathers with chronic depressive symptoms are less sensitive to their children, make less effort to comfort their children, and could also react with irritability or aggression toward their children,” the authors conclude. “On the other hand, it is plausible that excessive infant crying will put fathers with depressive symptoms during pregnancy at a higher risk to remain or become more depressed after childbirth because of the higher demands of caring for a child who cannot be comforted.”
This comes on the heels of a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May confirming that men, too, appear to get post-partum depression. The symptoms may differ, with women becoming sad and withdrawn and men becoming irritable, but it can be classified as post-partum depression nonetheless.
The study, by researchers at the Center for Pediatric Research at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, reviewed data on 5,000 couples when their children were nine-months-old. One in ten fathers met the criteria for “moderate to severe postpartum depression,” which is well above the three to five percent of men in the general population who meet those criteria. (In contrast, 14 percent of new mothers have post-partum depression compared with 7 to ten percent of women in the general population.)
But while both men and women who are depressed interacted “significantly” less with their children – less reading and singing and story telling – it was only paternal depression that seems to have a measurable effect on a child’s development later on. Children of fathers with postpartum depression had smaller vocabularies at two years than children of non-depressed fathers or those of depressed mothers.
Does it ring true to you that fathers get depressed in the months after a baby arrives? Or that a depressed father has as at least as much of an effect on their baby’s development as a depressed mother? Have you lived with colic in your newborn? Postpartum depression in your spouse? What got you through?

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