When IT professional Nikhil Roy was promoted as senior manager, it was only the first of two successively joyous weekends. Seven days later his wife gave birth to a son.
The joys were short-lived as Roy’s life seemed to slowly unravel. He could not concentrate at work, and spent hours staring blankly at his computer screen. He felt a strange sense of unease he could not quite explain.
Roy traced his moods to the challenging new assignment which required him to deal with the problems of his colleagues. But when the negative feeling got really out-of-hand, he fixed up to meet a clinical psychologist.
A few sessions with clinical psychologist Samindara Sawant made him realise the source of the problem lay far outside his office cubicle. In fact, it lay at his home. “I was at first unable to detect the true reasons for his problem, but whenever he spoke about his son, he became fidgety, his shoulders drooped, and his entire body language was negative,” recalls Sawant.
It took Sawant a couple of sessions with Roy and his wife to figure out that he was suffering from something most first-time fathers fall prey to in varying degrees: postpartum depression. He was unable to cope with the fact that he was now a father. He neglected his son and shied away from parenting responsibilities.
That 80% of women suffer from postpartum blues caused by a hormonal swing is now an established fact. In 10 per cent this is severe enough to warrant a visit to a doctor. But paternal postpartum depression is something few talk of. But according to a study done in England and reported in The Lancet, 4% of fathers suffer clinically significant depressive symptoms after the birth of their children.
“There is a tectonic shift in his life. The mother does not pay as much attention to him any more. He has more responsibilities and a new role. And if preconditions of depression are present — smaller amounts of serotonin or happy hormones — then it is very easy for postpartum depression to set in,” says therapist Jyoti Maheshwari.
Psychiatrist Anjali Chabbria says the problem is more common than imagined. Almost every new father goes through some amount of stress, she says, and sometimes it can lead to a more severe form of clinical depression. “It is just that people are unaware of the fact that postpartum depression can afflict fathers. Even if fathers do notice such a problem, being men, they hardly ever express it,” she says.
Business analyst Prashant Sharma became a father a years ago and found to his dismay that he was not prepared for this new role. “As I saw my wife becoming fuller, I increasingly doubted my readiness to play father,” he recalls. Sharma’s son was born a month prematurely and he suddenly became a father even sooner than he had expected.
“I took a month off from work to be with my son and wife, and then realised what a noisy new guest I had,” says Sharma. “Like all other babies, he would constantly cry, and as much as I helped my wife, frustration later did seep in.”
When Sharma resumed work, the problem worsened. “I would come back from work, tired, and then have to deal the chaos at home. I also realised how I had ceased to be the focus of my wife’s attention.” It took Sharma another two months to adjust to his new life.
Today he is able to look back and analyse his problem in the right perspective: he had simply taken time to adjust to a new environment. Last month Sharma celebrated his child’s first birthday, much more at ease with his new role.
Closer study however has shown that the problem may actually be physical. Fatherhood it seems has its own attendant biology, so much so that it can alter the brain. The journal Nature Neuroscience reported a study on marmoset monkeys which proved that the fathers among them had a higher density of connections in the prefrontal cortex region of the brain than non-fathers.
Also, the fathers had more receptors in this region for vasopressin (a hormone that is involved in parental behaviour and social bonding). This effectively meant that the brain of a marmoset father was different from that of a non-father. While no such tests have been conducted on humans, it is interesting to note that the same brain area (prefrontal cortex) is known to be activated in humans when parents are shown pictures of their children.
Other studies have also shown how testosterone levels drop in men during their partner’s pregnancy, perhaps to make expectant fathers less aggressive and therefore more likely to bond with their newborns. Given the known association between depression and low testosterone in middle-aged men, it is possible that this condition also puts some men at the risk of postpartum depression.
A clinically depressed father could cause a great deal of stress in a newly expanded family. “Most mothers suffer from some form of sadness and expect the fathers to step up to the challenges of starting a family. But if he himself is depressed, it greatly aggravates the situation,” says Dr Chabbria.
She points out that bonding with the child at this stage is very important for new parents. A father needs to spend time touching and holding the child to bond better. A depressed father could have trouble forging an easy relationship with his child in later years, she adds.
Sometimes the stress of being new parents can try the stability of even stable marriages. New mothers often do not realise that if husbands seem distant soon after a baby comes home, it is because they are having a tough time coming to terms with fatherhood.
Chartered accountant Neil Thomas and his wife quarrelled incessantly soon after they became parents. The family doctor referred them to Sawant. The couple was looking for marital counselling but found that the root of the discord lay in Thomas’ fears about being an adequate father. So sharp were his fears that he just stayed away from the infant and his wife.
Today, after many sessions with the psychologist and a course of anti-depressants, Thomas spends the prescribed half-an-hour daily with his child.
(Names of patients have been changed on request)
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