While about 10% of new moms get depression, a 2005 study showed that 4% of dads had significant symptoms as well. Richard Friedman writes in the New York Times that a drop in testosterone associated with a partner's pregnancy may cause depression. But life changes may be a factor as well. Friedman writes of a male patient who lamented, "We go out a lot with friends to dinner and theater. Now I guess that's all going to end." And the biggest risk factor for male postpartum depression is having a depressed partner — dads whose partners are depressed are two and a half times more likely to suffer themselves. Friedman points out,

Unlike women, men are not generally brought up to express their emotions or ask for help. This can be especially problematic for new fathers, since the prospect of parenthood carries all kinds of insecurities: What kind of father will I be? Can I support my family? Is this the end of my freedom?

Not only are men not encouraged to share their emotions — they're widely considered not to have as many emotions where children are concerned. Commenter Zorba on the Times' Well blog writes,

I am so relieved to see this. This connects with my long-held suspicion (that no one will validate) that MOST MEN DO NOT WANT CHILDREN. As a woman, I hear women complain all the time about how men don't get how difficult it is to be pregnant, have a baby, be a mother but these are the same women who were giving their husbands ultimatums when the men didn't want to get pregnant and even (more often than you'd think) lying and leaving off birth control to have a baby regardless of their husband's feelings. This makes me sad because I would like to think that fatherhood is something men really want but most of the men I hear about are bamboozled into it. Do men even want kinds? Is that why they get depressed?

But Zorba could just as easily say that women don't want kids, because they suffer from postpartum depression more often than men. Unfortunately, several male commenters chime in to reinforce the old stereotype that men who have kids are just giving in to their wives. Says Calmd,

Based on the comments of the women, why do women want kids anyway? After our first, my wife wanted more. I said no way. Our child is 12 but my wife still resents wish not to have more kids.

Sounds awesome. But not as awesome as this, by Penumbranian:

Children change everything irreversibly. They cost time, energy, money and space. The spatial and temporal boundaries shift, your spouse pays less attention to you, even totally ignores you. Does she still love you? Did she choose you to have children only? My wife was yelling at me: "My biological clock is ticking! With you or without you I'm going to have children!" Perhaps I had children with her only to please her, to be kept by her, not to be dumped by her.
Yes, your freedom will be lost. I know a couple who did not go to see a movie for five years after they had a child. This is widely considered normal.
If a father should talk about these and related concerns, like I did, he may be labelled as "immature" or worse, like I was.

What both of these comments underscore is the need to talk about children before you get married. When one partner wants them much more than the other, resentment and depression can easily result. Despite the words of Calmd and Penumbranian, it's not always the woman who wants kids more. However, women do bear a greater physical, and often a greater social burden in pregnancy and child-rearing. Writes D.J.,

Hmm, the men don't give birth, don't carry a child for nine months, don't have hormonal or weight fluctuations, swollen ankles, stretch marks, sleepless nights when there is no comfortable position in bed, heartburn, morning sickness, but they want to suffer from post-partum depression. Then, they usually aren't the ones nursing, or have a body trying to return to it's pre-pregnancy status. They typically aren't the ones getting up in the middle of the night to feed or calm the baby, run the rest of the household if there are other children and still have a smidgen of time for themselves. My husband was a helpful as the next one, but given everything that a man doesn't go through, it sounds like whining to me.

It's true that men don't have to go through the physical changes of pregnancy. And it's true that expectations of moms are still higher than expectations of dads. But that doesn't mean men aren't emotionally invested. A commenter who identifies himself as "a medical student and father" writes,

Fathers don't want to suffer from postpartum depression- No one wants to suffer from depression! Depression is not a ‘badge of honor' for all the hardships they have been through- depression is a terrible and crippling (sometimes fatal) disease. Its true that there is likely a different hormonal aspect to the depression but the fact of the matter is we, the scientific community, do not know what causes depression or what combination of hundreds or thousands of bio-psycho-social factors lead to a depressive episode. Whether you label it postpartum depression for women or after pregnancy depression for men, its depression.

The important point is that doctors, like everyone else should be aware of who is at risk and try to understand, treat and hopefully relieve suffering.

Doctors do need to be aware of male postpartum depression — and perhaps we all need to be more inclusive when it comes to a father's role. Many men are still trained to view involved parenting as somehow feminine, and they need to resist this training. At the same time, though, if we as a society want men to share equally in the mundane parts of parenting, the "getting up in the middle of the night to feed or calm the baby," we need to acknowledge that they share in the emotional parts as well. Male postpartum depression may feel like "whining" when women still bear the brunt of child-rearing responsibility, but treating this depression can also be a step towards accepting men's emotional investment in the family and channeling this investment into actual time spent with kids. Children may affect men more than they're currently encouraged to admit — and recognizing this would be good for everyone.

Postpartum Depression Strikes Fathers, Too [NYT]
When New Fathers Get Depressed [NYT Well Blog]

• A new summer camp has opened in the U.K. that advertises itself as an alternative to all the religious camps run by church groups. The atheists camp says it teaches climbing, canoeing, and rafting, along with tolerance and empathy. If only this has been around when I was expelled from camp YMCA at age 17 for not being "Christian enough." • According to a new study, pregnant women who contract swine flu are four times more likely to be hospitalized than others with the virus. • Doctors have developed a new way to test for chlamydia in men, which requires nothing more than a little pee in a cup. The old way involved a painful urethral swab, and doctors hope that more men will be willing to get tested now that they don't need to have a q-tip stuck up their dicks. • The most horrible story in the news this week just got sadder: Otty Sanchez, the schizophrenic mother who killed and cannibalized her infant baby, may have exhibited warning signs that she was suffering from postpartum depression before the murder. • British TV presenter Nick Knowles tells The Mirror about being a "sex god," which apparently requires drinking Jack and Coke, smoking, and going for a run once in a while. • James von Brunn, who shot a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum last month, is being indicted on hate crime charges. • A man was arrested for sexually assaulting a horse named Sugar — again. He had been arrested for the same crime a year earlier. • A dubious-sounding online study suggests that Canadian men think of physical contact as the boundary between fidelity and infidelity. 16% of respondents thought going to a strip club was cheating, but 65% thought getting an "exotic" massage was. • Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese UN employee, is challenging her arrest in Khartoum for wearing pants in public. If she loses, she could get 40 lashes. • Despite publicity about such "fringe" cosmetic surgeries as vaginal rejuvenation, this and other unusual procedures are only performed on 1.6% of cosmetic surgery patients. • In a substantive and "judicious" criticism, Rush Limbaugh says Andrea Dworkin "could be the poster child" for obesity. • Australian radio host Kyle Sandilands won't apologize for asking "is that the only experience you've had" after a 14-year-old girl revealed on his show that she had been raped. • According to GLAAD, HBO has the most LGBT representation on television, TBS and A&E have the least, and TNT showed the biggest increase. • More women use social networking sites than men, especially among those 45 and older — 4.6 million women over 45 are signed up for Facebook, compared to only 2.6 million men of the same age group. • A study by the amusingly named Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior found that depressed patients saw relief from their symptoms after a weight-loss program. • Pro-choice activist Charles Wright was beaten to the ground outside an Akron abortion clinic on Saturday; you can send him a message of support through NOW. • Porn star and possible Senate candidate Stormy Daniels was arrested Saturday night on domestic violence charges. •

A Time article on the Melanie Blocker-Stokes Postpartum Depression Research and Care Act (oddly, written by someone named Robert McNamara, presumably not the deceased former Secretary of Defense) says that although the bill doesn't specifically set aside money for postpartum depression screening, critics think screening would "naturally increase" if it passed. They say this could lead to false positives (as few as a third of women whose initial postpartum depression screen is positive actually have the disease) and unnecessary medication. Supporters of screening counter that postpartum depression is far from rare — up to one in seven moms get it — and that we routinely screen babies for conditions that are much less common. And screening might prevent tragedies like that of Melanie Blocker-Stokes, the act's namesake, who jumped off a building when her child was 3 1/2 months old.

It's hard to argue with increased funding for research into a condition that kills some new mothers and plunges many more into misery — not to mention putting babies at risk. At the same time, there's something a little "Yellow Wallpaper"-y about assuming that all women are in danger of flying off the handle and harming themselves or their kids. Psychologist Paula Caplan notes that adjusting to motherhood is tough, and we shouldn't assume that everyone who has some difficulty with it is mentally ill. Rather, we "should be addressing the social factors causing women to be upset after they give birth, not locating the problem within the women." Women's studies professor Ingrid Johnston-Robledo offers a similar opinion: "We need to find a way to come down in the middle: acknowledge women's depression but not assume that all women who struggle with the transition to motherhood are depressed." But that would mean developing a measured, considered response to a potentially divisive issue. Can we do that in this country?

The Melancholy Of Motherhood [Time]

So now post-partum depression is not just a mom issue. There's even a site called SadDaddy.com, run by Dr. Will Courtenay, who says that whether a man will become depressed depends on whether his partner is depressed: "Half of all men whose partners have postpartum depression are depressed themselves," he says. He also counts stress, economic concerns, anxiety and hormone changes as factors in male postpartum depression. Yes, hormones. "Men's hormones change. too, both during pregnancy and early in the postpartum period," he explains. "Our testosterone levels go down, and our estrogen levels go up.Our testosterone levels go down, and our estrogen levels go up."

But even more unnerving is what Dr. Courtenay calls the "signs of depression" in men:

When we think of a depressed person, we usually picture someone who's sad and crying. But if we picture instead a guy who's working 60 hours a week, is a little short-tempered, drinks a couple of beers at lunch, slips out of the office to have an affair, then speeds home to his wife, that's not what we picture when we think of depression, but those are some of the signs of men's depression, which can often look different.

Yes. An affair. Additionally, Dr. Courtenay says:

One of the things we hear from men is that they have difficulty hearing a child crying uncontrollably. It's one of the things that seems to stand out the most. There's a kind of helplessness that men are not used to experiencing. We like to feel confident, so when we can't make this helpless infant feel better it creates a lot of difficulty.

Really? Really? Look, of course we should take depressed new dads seriously. But is it supposed to be easy to hear a crying child? Newsweek's Christina Gillham asks, "Surely there are many who might think, "Hey, wait a minute-I went through the nine months of pregnancy, I went through the grueling labor, I'm staying up all night doing all the breastfeeding-and you're depressed?'" Dr. Courteney's answer is that it speaks to "our cultural denial of men's depression in general." But is this about denial? Or expectations? Because even though having a child is a life-changing event for both a mother and father, don't women expect men to put emotions aside and "man up," as it were? And if drinking at lunch, affairs and avoiding a crying baby are sympotms, what's the difference between a man with postpartum depression and a total jerk?

Understanding Male Post-Partum Depression [Newsweek]

Have we become so precious and hyper-conscious that something women have been doing for time immemorial is now ranked alongside war as a painful event? Besides, according to the Canadian Mental Health Association, the kind of anxiety experienced by people with PTSD is felt by 1 in 10 people  about on par with the 9% of women who get postpartum PTSD. Even Shari Lusskin, director of reproductive psychiatry at New York University Medical Center, tells the WSJ, "We don't want to overmedicalize a normal part of human development…Just because you had a traumatic birth, doesn't mean you'll get PTSD."

It's sort of a pat explanation to say that the diagnosis of PTSD in women post-childbirth is all a big pharma conspiracy to get women hooked on anti-depressants, and I think that it's much more complicated than that. Certainly, having a bowling ball of a baby shooting out your vag isn't a picnic for anyone, but the hysteria surrounding something so matter-of-fact is troubling.

Birth Trauma: Stress Disorder Afflicts Moms [WSJ]

Most moms hold their babies toward the left regardless of their dominant hand, and the overwhelming majority of moms who had no signs of stress or depression all held toward the left. So, to recap: left = not depressed; right = please pass the Prozac.

Naomi Watts: Depressed. And frazzled.

Britney Spears: Not depressed. (But when we think of her, we are.)

Paris Hilton: Not depressed. (No, we don't know who the hell this kid actually belongs to. But it's obviously someone who would let Paris Hilton hold her child.)

Nicole Kidman: Depressed. And perfecter of bitch-face. (That's her niece, by the by.)

Katie Holmes: Not depressed. (Xenu mind-meld, maybe?)

Brooke Shields: Depressed. But you knew that.

By the way, we don't have kids, but we do have dogs in the family, and guess what? This whole right/left thing is reversed when it comes to canines. Researchers have discovered that when a dog is experiencing positive emotions, its tail wags more to the right; negative stimuli produced left-biased tail wagging.

How You Hold Your Baby Tells Whether You're Depressed [Babble]
If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It's in His Tail [NYTimes]

• Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards, daughter of late Texas firebrand Ann Richards, tactfully rips John McCain's campaign a new one after his top strategist calls Planned Parenthood "one of the most radical pro-abortion groups in the country." [Politico]
• Swedish girls are getting fatter and no one knows why. We blame global warming. [USAToday]
• Wait, maybe we should blame mothers! After all, children born to women with postpartum depression tend to be rated as "emotionally negative" more than other kids. [Salon]
• A man charged with rape who had the allegation cleared because the judge fell asleep at his hearing has now raped two more women. [DailyTelegraph]

• In shades of Heavenly Creatures, two teenage Australian girls have been charged with the murder of a friend during a sleepover. Their reasoning? "It just felt right". [Daily Telegraph]
• Feeling like a fat, depressed slob? It could be your thyroid. [CNN]

Poor Tabitha Soren. First her former colleagues at MTV get laid off; next, her husband, Michael Lewis, tells the world that she's an emotional mess. According to her husband's online essay in Slate today, the flame-haired former VJ isn't faring so well after the birth of her third child:

One afternoon I find my wife standing in the kitchen preparing, once again, to cry. The pills they gave her [Ed: Huh? What pills?] instantly silenced the brain screams. She's gone from being terrified that she's losing her mind and that everyone she loves is going to soon die to being, occasionally, sad. I'll come across her getting dressed or sterilizing baby bottles, standing as still as a lady in a Vermeer painting, with tears in her eyes. There's no point in asking what's the matter—you might as well ask a flat tire why it doesn't have air.

In addition to bits like that one, Lewis uses the occasion of his essay to confess just how badly behaved his two daughters, Quinn and Dixie, really are:

Just four weeks after the birth of my son, both of my daughters are living, in effect, outside the law. They act as if they have nothing to lose, and, materially speaking, they don't. They've behaved so badly, for so long, that everything that might be taken away from them has been taken away: TV, candy, desserts, play dates, special dinners, special breakfasts, special outings with parents. They are like a pair of convicts in a Soviet gulag with nothing more than they need to survive—and still they continue to subvert the authorities.

You go, girls! Maybe it's just us, but we think insolence and stubbornness should be encouraged in young females, because it's only a matter of time before the insecurities over looks, smarts, social status and boys will kick in, insecurities that will only deepen once puberty hits and then hover around like a bad drug habit well into one's third decade. And then when that's all well and done with of course, there's marriage, pregnancy, postpartum depression, and husbands who compare you to a flat tire. "Living outside the law" is the least a young lass should do.