Angry and Overwhelmed: The Men Who Experience Postnatal Depression

Photo by Meaghan Curry via Stocksy.

Photographer Israel and his wife Sarah* suffered two miscarriages trying to conceive their second child. So when they found out she was pregnant, they were ecstatic—and immediately set out to reconfigure their lifestyle and work routines to prepare for the birth. Wanting his partner to be able to embrace full-time motherhood, Israel also took on new management roles and extra workloads.

With its mixture of sleep deprivation and endless domestic chores, parenting was tough on both of them. However, increased professional responsibilities saw it take a unique toll on Israel, who found himself becoming increasingly overwhelmed and further behind in work. Within weeks of the birth of their son, cracks in his psyche started to show. Not wanting to burden his wife, however, he stayed quiet. "But the cracks started becoming fractures and then fault-lines," Israel says. "I was angry at everything, and felt overwhelmed, sad, and hopeless most of the time."

When he finally consulted a psychologist, he was diagnosed with general depression, but little changed. It wasn't until his wife began to fear Israel might self-harm that the couple starting looking into the root of the problem on a deeper level, and Israel was eventually diagnosed with postnatal depression (PND), a condition typically associated with new mothers.

Once dismissed as "the baby blues," PND, also known as postpartum depression, is now firmly established as a mental health condition, and recognized as equal in severity to other depressive illnesses. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 11 to 20 percent of women who give birth each year have symptoms, and are more likely to suffer from the condition due to their more direct experiences of childbirth and primary care. But research also suggests that some new fathers—estimates vary between four and ten percent—also experience depression after the birth of a child.

Social expectations and stigma have seen these men's experiences remain somewhat hidden, but PND in men has actually been on researchers' radars for almost a decade, says Anna Machin, who led a study on the issue in 2015 at Oxford University. "Many men find it difficult to admit they have had PND because they often get a poor reaction [to claiming they are suffering from it]," says Machin. "There is a general attitude of 'Pull yourself together.'"

Machin's team interviewed 15 fathers over an eight-month period, before and after the birth of their babies, and concluded that a male form of PND did in fact exist, with its own distinct set of symptoms. In women, Machin says, PND is characterized most commonly by anxiety, insomnia and extreme melancholy. Men seem to experience more withdrawal, aggression, and self-destructive behaviors.

"In men, PND is as real and as distressing as in women," Machin explains. "[Men] tend to not be interested in looking after themselves or joining in social interaction. They gain little joy from life. It often impacts negatively on sleep and appetite. They may have thoughts about self-harm. In severe cases, they may have made plans about killing themselves."

Similarly, a recent study from the University of Auckland identified symptoms of paternal PND in around four percent of 3,500 New Zealand fathers. "Increasingly, we are becoming aware of the influence that fathers have on their children's psychosocial and cognitive development," the report reads. "Given the potential for paternal depression to have direct and indirect effects on children, it is important that we recognise and treat symptoms among fathers early"

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