To say post natal depression is limited to women?

[user7643789]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-60319568

I do believe men can experience depression at any stage in life but as they cannot give birth they don't experience the hormonal and physical response.

P.S. I love the name ClumpingBambooIsALie.

It really bloody is.

Delphic wisdom of mums

Imagine coming on a site called 'Mumsnet' and sneering at mothers.

@DomesticatedZombie

Delphic wisdom of mums

Imagine coming on a site called 'Mumsnet' and sneering at mothers.

Imagine walking into a gay club in the 1960s and mocking people if they disagreed with the professional consensus that homosexuality is a mental illness. Because how could professionals possibly get it wrong.

So can a grandparent have PND? Or the best friend of someone who has had a baby? Or a sibling of a new baby? Is anyone who has depression following a baby coming into their lives classed as having PND?

The term Post Natal Depression should only be used for the woman who has given birth!

Effective healthcare needs MORE detail and specificity, not less. This especially applies to women's healthcare, where we are often dismissed, belittled, not believed and not listened to.

If people want to address depression in new fathers, I'd suggest it'd be more helpful all round if they looked at that phenomenon and what specific factors are affecting it/involved. They are likely to be different. I don't think breastfeeding support and pelvic floor exercises are going to help new fathers, frankly.

@TempName01

So can a grandparent have PND? Or the best friend of someone who has had a baby? Or a sibling of a new baby? Is anyone who has depression following a baby coming into their lives classed as having PND?

The term Post Natal Depression should only be used for the woman who has given birth!

Maybe THE WHOLE WORLD can have PND, seeing as women just keep popping them out, eh? Oh, there goes another one! Who feels depressed? Do you feel depressed? Maybe it's PND!

Brilliant point DomZom. Any time you feel bad because of another person, well you wouldn't feel that way if they'd never been born, right? PND for all!

Post natal doesn’t just mean after any birth it means after YOU have given birth. Otherwise anyone can suffer Post natal depression - siblings, grandparents, friends, neighbours

The hormonal changes and physical changes lead to something quite specific, it can be very different to depression as it is hormone driven.

Of course men can suffer depression Post birth of their child but it needs to be differentiated from the one who is suffering specific physical and hormonal challenges as a result of GIVING birth.

My neighbour's had a baby and I'm feeling depressed, does that mean I have PND

Oh wait I think I get it now, I was born so I definitely could have PND 🤔

@PurgatoryOfPotholes

P.S. I love the name ClumpingBambooIsALie.

It really bloody is.

Inspired by having to clear a panda paradise taking up an entire garden, the result of the neighbours' "clumping" bamboo, as well as seeing relatives trying to work out how to deal with the "clumping" bamboo from their ornamental grass bed having sent out rhizomes to ruin their lawn many metres away. Which of course you can't use an appropriate weedkiller on, because it would kill the grass.

I've been trying to get rid of some for years. Even in places where you can use weedkiller, it is not as effective as it says it is on the bottle!

What you need, Purgatory, is a pet panda.

Perhaps two.

I cleared the panda paradise by cutting down the bamboo, then digging up all the soil in the garden (admittedly, a small terraced garden with a layer of bricks about a foot below the surface, but still), and hand-sieving it into a skip bag through a fine soil riddle to remove all the rhizome pieces. It took a very long time.

Anyway. Apologies for the diversion.

@cuno

My neighbour's had a baby and I'm feeling depressed, does that mean I have PND

Of course a poor woman can still have PND after suffering a still birth or late miscarriage because, even though she has ended up without a live baby, she was pregnant prior to that.

At no point, before during or after the birth, has the father ever been pregnant.

I am a mum and a doula. I'm not a man that writes articles about woman's experience giving birth though so there is that. I do feel qualified somehow mystically by my vaginal birth right to say that men can not categorically have PND by association to a woman.

Mystical is good adjective for your vagina qualifications to pontificate on what illnesses a man can or cannot have. Similar to the mystical penis qualifications used to declare what illnesses a woman can or cannot have. Since the latter was proven to be absolute crap,, then why would the former be any better?

@mowglika

Post natal doesn’t just mean after any birth it means after YOU have given birth. Otherwise anyone can suffer Post natal depression - siblings, grandparents, friends, neighbours

The hormonal changes and physical changes lead to something quite specific, it can be very different to depression as it is hormone driven.

Of course men can suffer depression Post birth of their child but it needs to be differentiated from the one who is suffering specific physical and hormonal challenges as a result of GIVING birth.

No it doesn’t. You don’t have to have given birth to get PND. It can effect partners as well. Reference the NHS webpage and all medical peer reviewed information published on PND and not the rad fem faux outrage articles.

@ClumpingBambooIsALie

BTW nothing against the "Delphic wisdom of mums" (nice of you to denigrate the value of women's experience that way), but I'm not approaching this from the perspective you think I'm approaching it from. I've never been, and have no intention of ever being, a mum, so have no vested interest in any supposed wisdom of mumness. I just believe that what we call things matters, and that women matter.

Well I am a mum, so if you truly thought we mums are so wise about post natal matters, then wouldn’t you be centring our voices instead of avidly defending a point of view about which you have zero experience?

This is all part of the "inclusion is always good, exclusion is always bad" bollocks.

We could, for example, decide that anything with a mood component is included in bipolar disorder. Depressed? You're bipolar. PND? You're bipolar. But unless you want people given inappropriate treatments, you'd then have to subdivide bipolar disorder, and make it so that people with, say, PMDD are excluded from some of the subdivisions of the new, inclusive bipolar disorder.

I want to see a good argument for why PND should be opened up to people who have not recently given birth, as opposed to the traditional inclusion criteria which are in the name of the disorder. Not just the "appeal to authority" fallacy you're pushing, but an actual argument for why it makes logical sense and why it does more good than harm to make "PND" inclusive of all these other circumstances.

Wait. So you try to discredit people for being mums by mocking them, and you try to discredit people for not being mums by saying we have no experience?

You're not so bright, are you?

@ClumpingBambooIsALie
Actually, you need a scientific argument as to why PND should be made exclusive to women? It has been “opened up” to include partners for over a decade now. So, I’m not the one arguing that all the scientists and experts for the past ten years have got it wrong....you are. So you need to put together something to counter the scores of peer reviewed studies and all the current medical literature on PND.

And I’m sorry, but the do you have a vagina and were you pregnant isn’t scientific when it comes to can a person suffer from a certain mental illness. Not unless we go back a few hundred years. What you are arguing for seems regressive to me.

You think ten years is a long time? You think there's consensus? Go eat crayons and wallow in your own misogyny, I'm bored with you.