Dads Get Postpartum Depression Too

May 18, 2010— -- When the depression hit after the birth of his first child, Joel Schwartzberg said he didn't believe anyone had a name for what he was going through.

"Within the first week of bringing my baby home, I thought, 'Oh my gosh, what have we done?'" Schwartzberg said of his son, who is now 10.

Going out and seeing other new parents only made his anxiety worse.

"Other fathers felt happy and joyous," said Schwartzberg. "Inside, I felt like my world had collapsed, and along with that, I felt a great and incredible sense of responsibility, and that sense of responsibility was so weighty. … "

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has at last put numbers to men like Schwartzberg, who fall into their own version of a postpartum depression, a condition usually associated with new mothers, after a baby arrives.

Researchers found that at least one in 10 new fathers experienced postpartum depression.

"I thought I was the only person in the world who was a bad dad. I thought I was deficient, that I was handicapped. What I learned was that I was not alone by any stretch. It helped me relax; it helped me not be so hard on myself," said Schwartzberg, who eventually read about a doctor who had studied postpartum depression in fathers.

In the current JAMA study, researchers from Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va., analyzed 43 studies involving a total of 28,004 men. In general, only about 4.8 percent of men fit the diagnosis of depression. But in fathers with a new baby, depression averaged 10.4 percent. Three months after birth, the study found more than 25 percent of men were depressed.