Beating the baby blues
If this sounds like you, it could be that you’ve got the ‘baby blues’ – a mild form of post-natal depression, which affects nearly 80% of new mothers. You may feel tired and tearful, anxious and mildly depressed, often for reasons you can’t quite identify.
Symptoms of mild depression after birth are quite normal. They’re certainly not pleasant but they’re unlikely to be harmful to you, your baby or your close relationships. So it’s important to make the distinction between the ‘baby blues’– which can emerge around four days after the birth and persist for several weeks – and the persistent, deeper unhappiness, which goes on for much longer.
Moderate depression, which affects around 15% of women, can be difficult to distinguish from baby blues, especially in the early days. It can be more difficult to shift and have a deeper affect on your life. While it can respond well to self-treatment, especially in a supportive home environment, help from your doctor, health visitor or a counsellor is strongly recommended. Severe depression after birth is rare (occurring in only 1-2% of women) but may put both mothers and their babies at risk – it requires professional help. For more information see: Dr Howard Lee’s article: Post Natal Depression.
What’s causing you to feel depressed?
Over the years, scientists have attempted to discover the cause of post-natal depression but have been unable to make absolute connections between it and things like hormone levels, socio-economic status, age or the difficulty of the birth.
It may be that depression has a real and valid role to play in the early days of motherhood. Depression, as experienced by so many women after birth, can for instance be part of a legitimate emotional process.
In 1996, psychologists from the University of the West of England, Bristol, discovered that post-natal depression may sometimes be a form of grieving for a lost lifestyle. During interviews with new mothers suffering depression, the researchers found that all the women missed the freedom of a child-free existence and, in some cases, missed their old body image.
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