depression, medication, reproduction
October 5, 2009
It amazes me how many articles on the internet discuss the impact of antidepressant meds during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Not that it surprises me that expectant mothers get depressed; this seems a perfectly normal reaction. (Does that make me weird?) I understand succumbing to depression while pregnant. What I struggle with, is people with a history of depression, who choose to go on to have children.
Okay, I admit here that I’m not the most maternal of females. I suspect if I had my own children, that I would very well end up eating my young, for all the maternal feelings I have. But truly, the thought of choosing to be pregnant and risking coming off/not being able to take antidepressants, and go through depression without that option, scares me. I struggle to cope on meds; I can’t begin to imagine what life is like off them, especially when pregnant.
And then, you have the baby. I would definitely need meds to deal with a crying, helpless little baby who can’t let you know what it needs. Plus the interrupted sleep. Oh god, just the thought of the bad sleep is enough to scare me off forever. Tiredness is the number one trigger for me.
It’s fine if the only real impact is on yourself. I can be suicidal and know that my darling SO can still feed himself and go to work, and do everything he needs to. A baby, on the other hand, needs a competent parent to survive. And when I’m badly depressed, I can’t look after myself, let alone a poor little baby that didn’t ask to be born into this world to a suicidal mother.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not criticising women with a history of depression who choose to have children. I actually think they’re about as brave as anyone I can think of. It’s just I couldn’t do it, myself. I’m just not strong enough.
I suppose the reason I’m thinking about this is because all my friends are pregnant at the moment. I look at them and marvel. And in the back of my head is a little voice that says, even if you wanted to go there and try it, you’re a good two years away from even being stable on your new drugs. Thinking about having kids has been pharmaceutically pushed out by a significant time frame. This doesn’t particularly worry me, but SO may well find it difficult to cope with when it occurs to him. Poor darling, he loves kids.
So, yes. Something else to ponder on.
October 6, 2009 at 1:29 am
I DO want children, so I’ve been reading a lot about this.
This is what I have found:
Some antidepressants MAY have slightly (but unproven) increased risk of heart and vein malformations, but the increase is slow small that they can’t agree about whether it is statistically significant and if so WHICH antidepressants cause them.
One long term study showed that children of mothers who were on antidepressants rated comparably to children whose mothers were NOT in mood, social behaviour, and IQ (in fact, the antidepressant group had a higher average IQ).
There are many, many proven studies showing the negative long term effects on infants of depressed mothers. They cry more. They have long term antisocial behaviour effects. They even have lower birth weights.
These are all things I will have to weight before I get pregnant, but I think people spend far more time freaking about about being “unnatural” and not enough time thinking about the severe effects of simply HAVING depression. It’s like, if you have diabetes you don’t just stop treating it, do you? Stopping treating depression seems equally stupid.
/ramble.