Little Boy Blues

When my son was born my partner went into a severe depression. We hadn’t anticipated this at all. He was incredibly supportive during the second half of the pregnancy, having just started on meds and therapy at the time. He was fantastic during the birth.

Then we took the baby home.

My partner had two months off work. He’d saved his holidays and taken parental leave and it was going to be a supportive, shared experience.

Instead what happened was that he went almost immediately into a deep and prolonged depressive episode.

He suffered anxiety around even holding the baby. I wasn’t able to leave the house without the baby at all. He could barely move from the sofa, was able to do very, very little around the house and spent a lot of time crying, often sobbing.

When he went back to work the anxiety transferred to financial concerns – how would he be able to support us all? He felt like a failure because we were living in a small, run-down flat at the time. It was temporary but really pretty awful.

There were good moments though. There was no doubt of the love that he felt for our child. On some days we went out together on the bus. We even took our six-week-old to a festival.

Other days were awful. Our first major outing was to a friend’s wedding when the baby was six weeks old. We rented a car and bought a baby seat. Of course, we hadn’t figured on the fact that you need a PhD to install one of those things on your own the first time you do it. It completely threw him and he ended up back upstairs, inside the flat, saying he wasn’t going.

I was so upset and so angry with him. I went downstairs, wrestled with the seat, got it installed, went back upstairs, talked him out of the bed and into the car, strapped the baby in and we got going.

He was angry with me the whole way there for making him go to the wedding. I was angry at him for suddenly deciding that the wedding of a close friend was not important enough for him to get off the couch for.

Now it’s not like he hadn’t been depressed before the baby arrived. But the suddenness and intensity and length of his depression following the birth definitely seemed like post-natal depression.

I was fine but he very clearly wasn’t. And it was frustrating for both us. I needed his help so much at that time and he wanted to help so much and his feelings didn’t seem legitimate to him. (Or to me, to be honest. I was so tired and strung out and disappointed and freaked out by what we’d just done to our lives.)

In hindsight, we could both have handled this better. It would have been great if there had been some more information around through all the hospital visits and antenatal classes or if the therapist had mentioned it as a risk for him. I think we could have prepared for the mental health repercussions while we were researching which sling to get or what pram or breastpumps or the thousand-and-one far less important things that we frittered away all that pre-baby free time on.
Flo

PS - There are some good fact sheets on the web:
Post and Antenatal Depression Association Inc
Black Dog Institute

But I couldn't find much in the way of research. Here's one: Paternal postnatal depression (PPND) in first time fathers: a grounded theory analysis