Does anyone else feel uncomfortable with this?

[Ilikegreenshoes]

Just that really. I'm quite sure that anyone can find themselves struggling with their mental health in the first few months of parenthood, and of course I sympathise, but I just felt uncomfortable with the term "postnatal depression" being applied in this instance.

Does anyone else feel that way, or do you think I'm being over sensitive?

(Sorry it's just a screenshot rather than the whole article.)

Fathers can suffer post-natal depression too, though I understand it is at lower rates than mothers. Without reading the article, I'm struggling to see what the "queer" angle is to this, other than being clickbait.

Fair enough, I was always under the impression that postnatal depression was specifically in birthing mothers, with strong links to the hormonal changes that their bodies go through. As distinct from depression.

Willing to take on that I may have got that wrong.

The rest of the article describes how this particular gay man struggled hugely with depression after moving to Australia with his partner and their very young twins (basically newborns) and felt really unsupported. Of course that sounds really awful for him, I'm not questioning that part at all. Just the specific terminology.

Men may experience depression after having kids but it's not post natal depression and it's not remotely like what women experience after giving birth.

I agree with you OP. If you haven’t given birth you aren’t “post-natal”.

However these threads on MN always get loads of posters arguing that “men can be post-natal too”, and “post-natal just refers to the period after a birth, not to the period after giving birth”, that suffering as a result of childbirth doesn’t solely mean suffering as a result of going through childbirth, and basically that anyone finding themselves caring for a newborn infant and feeling down hearted about it has got PND.

I just see it as: ‘shut up women, don’t think you’re special and deserve respect just because you’re the only ones who can give birth; and especially don’t whinge on about how hard it is for women after giving birth, us men have it hard you know!’

Same old same old, in other words.

It irks me too OP and I'd probably prefer a different term being applied. That said, men also experience a number of changes to their brain when they care for newborns so I accept that this may act as a trigger for depression in some men. If anybody has good research on this at hand I'd be really interested.

When we did our course with the NCT they mentioned that dads too can suffer with acute depression as a new parent. I can't remember if they called it PND or not and I agree we should save that for acute depression after birth in mothers, and use a different term for dads or other caregivers.

It's just another woman thing that men want in on. I don't think men should be watering down the concept of PND, are they going to try and say they can have postnatal psychosis too? Or do they only conveniently suffer from the milder forms?
I'm not saying it doesn't happen following the birth of a child but let's just call it depression in men and not muddy the waters.

PND and acute sleep deprivation have very similar symptoms IME, so I do believe the baby blues can be unisex in that way.

As for isolation; I'm assuming these are surrogate babies which have been commissioned, removed from their mother post-purchase and transported to the other side of the world. Not sure what he was expecting, if so.

Or, is it that the dad is a trans man and has given birth because he's female and technically the mum but actually now the dad alongside the other dad. So he can be post natally depressed because he is post partum.

Does the article say whether these men acquired newborn twins as a result of adoption due to the babies’ mother being unable to care for her children? or did they pay for a woman/ more than woman to put her life and health at risk by one woman donating her eggs to them and another woman having the embryo, created as a result of the donated eggs being fertilised by their sperm, implanted into her womb and undergoing pregnancy and childbirth for them?

If it’s the latter, I guess that “PND” attracts more sympathy than “post-reproductive exploitation of women regret”. Or even ‘Crikey, kids are hard work! I mean, who knew?’ syndrome.

Yep, eggs donated by a female relative and surrogate used, as far as I can tell. I also find this part deeply concerning, and am so glad that I'm not the only one.

Crikey, kids are hard work! I mean, who knew?

Call me cynical but I strongly believe this is all that fathers' "postnatal depression" ever is.

Whereas mothers have post birth trauma, huge amounts of hormones changing, lots of bodily pains and ailments in pregnancy and postpartum. The responsibility to breastfeed. Men just don't have any of those things going on.

At the very most, some husbands might have a kind of survivors' guilt (if that's the phrase I want) from witnessing his wife's traumatic birth.

The term is applied for fathers too. It might have been better if a different term had been used - maybe something 'neo-parental depression' would have been a more accurate descriptor applied to a parent who hadn't actually given birth. But probably too late to change the terminology now.

One question - do adoptive parents experience this too and have the same term applied?

Yep, post-natal depression and other post natal conditions relate to the woman who has been pregnant and given birth. It can have a hormonal element, and I am quite sure that some part of it is linked to the massive change in social role that women often experience. The shift from being an independent person to being perceived as a mum first with other aspects all falling into lesser consideration.

I wish that a different name was used for the situational depression experienced by men when they become new fathers. I don't see any point for anyone in these headlines and comments declaiming that "men get PND too!" as if women are receiving amazing special treatment post-birth that poor old men miss out on. IME post-natally, women are thoroughly abandoned by HCP if they appear to be coping on a superficial external level. Help is often only available after women become desperate and are in dangerous situations. And even then, what is available on the NHS is not amazing. There was a recent study that showed that post natal 6 week checks are failing new mothers (https://www.healthwatch.co.uk/news/2023-03-14/six-week-postnatal-checks-are-failing-many-new-mothers) for example. Although, I think this article is about a couple in Australia? So who knows what it's like there post-natally for women with PND, post-natal anxiety, post-natal psychosis, post-natal PTSD etc.

I've never liked the term postnatal depression or even the "baby blues" being applied to the dad. Postnatal depression should be specific to someone who has given birth recently - my understanding was that hormones play a part in it. When people talk about the "Baby blues" it has always been acknowledged as to do with the hormone crash after birth, which the dad does not experience.

I'm not saying dads can't have situational depression from sleep deprivation or the shock of being a parent but it is absolutely NOT postnatal depression because they are not postnatal.

I agree with you OP - I absolutely agree that men can suffer with mental ill health following the arrival of a baby. However the connotation of ‘post natal’ is that of giving birth and the associated changes in hormones, body shape, lactation etc.. that arrives only after giving birth!

I saw an article the other day that men are now suffering from a male menopause (really???)!!!

“But probably too late to change the terminology now.”

Well given that civic institutions didn’t appear to think it was “too late now” to change the terminology for women and their experiences, at the behest of Stonewall’s post-2015 “it’s all about the T now” campaign, I don’t see why it should be considered too late to change the inaccurate use of PND to describe men finding the early days/weeks/months of life as a new parent difficult.

New dads also experience hormonal change if they witness their baby's birth. Their testosterone dips for a while.

Nevertheless PND is far more complex than just hormones. It is in many cases akin to grieving the life style lost hence why the most common time it appears is 2-3 months after birth. That can happen regardless of sex.

The most serious forms of PND are chemical in nature however, and only female.

The testosterone dip in fathers is a small change.

Women go through so much more hormonal change, whole new ones appear to induce lactation, contract the uterus and many more huge, visible bodily changes.

It's frankly nonsense to compare the two.

So one of the two men is the twins’ biological uncle (I’m guessing*) and the other man is the twins’ biological father?

*. I’m assuming that the female relative most likely to be guilted into accepting the increased risk of a stroke in later life associated with egg donation would be his sister.

Postnatal depression is a condition that can only affect women who have given birth. It arises from the profound hormonal fluctuations of pregnancy and the post-natal period.

Anyone, including fathers and adoptive mothers, can experience an adjustment reaction and reactive depression to becoming a parent but this is not postnatal depression.

This.

Yep, soz men, it's just for us women.

This seems entirely reasonable to me given the huge role that hormones, and in this case specifically the hormone changes during and after pregnancy, play in depression

I wonder how the woman is feeling who was pregnant with these babies and gave birth to them?

She may be perfectly at ease with having had them removed from her, but her body was still flooded with massive hormonal changes, over which her rational mind has absolutely no control. She may well have post-natal depression.