WHY ARE MOTHERS PRONE TO DEPRESSION? A SURPRISING SUGGESTION

RAJ PERSAUD CONSULTANT PSYCHIATRIST
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A team of psychologists and psychiatrists based in Israel, have just published a fascinating study examining whether women who adopt are prone to a kind of post-natal depression. Just as women who deliver a baby biologically are said to be prone to.

The study lead by Yehuda Senecky and Alan Apter, with other colleagues, based largely at Tel Aviv and Bar Ilan Universities, surveyed almost 40 women before, and six weeks after they had adopted.

The intriguing finding was that the rate of depression in women who adopt just after the adoption is around 15%, which is almost exactly the rate of depression found in women who have given birth. The authors of this study suggest this is powerful evidence that the key mechanisms by which women develop post-natal depression must be more psychological and social rather than biological.

Controversy has raged about the precise causes of post-natal depression even long before the disorder was officially recognized (only as recently as 1994 did “depression of postpartum onset” officially appear in the formal psychiatric dictionary of diseases The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

Many doctors and experts in this field have contended that it’s the massive physiological changes which occur often abruptly around delivery and following pregnancy which account for the high rate of psychiatric disturbance in women shortly after delivery.

On the other hand others have suggested that there is a danger in ‘over-biologizing’ the condition. They suggest, instead, its perfectly understandable given all the stresses a new mother faces, that at this time of emotional turmoil, she should be prone to psychological problems.

The psychology of the situation includes the ‘intra-psychic’ dimension of how an individual mother reacts to and copes with her new child; as well as the wider social psychology of the predicament, involving the support she gets from those around her and their reaction as well to this event.

The more psychologically minded researchers in the field argue that it’s the crucial stress of ‘transition to parenthood’ which really underlies the cause of post-natal depression.

Alan Apter’s team in Israel suggest that putting aside the pregnancy itself, parents who adopt undergo many of the same difficulties in this ‘transition to parenthood’ as biological parents. Given approximately one in 40 children are now adopted in many parts of the Western world this is an increasingly common way by which families arise.

Adopting parents, contends the Israeli team, may also be subject to additional unique and potentially stressful hardships that might make their ‘transition to parenthood’ indeed more of a strain than becoming a ‘biological’ parent. Additional problems which adopting parents face that biological ones don’t, include coping with the inability to conceive and the difficulties engendered in the whole infertility journey. Then having surmounted those they next face agency evaluations of parental fitness, the uncertain wait for an eligible child, the adoption experience itself, and in many parts of the world, possible continuing social stigma.

Those who are brought into the world in the ‘taken for granted’ background of a family history and knowledge of that, may forget that adopting parents, given the lack of genetic heritage experience, also face the stress of the uncertainty of potential medical, developmental or biological problems of the adopted child.

Perhaps then, given these predicaments it should come as no surprise that the Israeli team found that adopting mums may experience the same rate of depression as biological mothers. Yet this rate was significantly less than the rate of depression this group was prone to before the adoption. The rate of depression in parents hoping to adopt, before adoption, was a staggering 25%. According to this study then the arrival of a child and the facing of the so-called stressful ‘transition to parenthood’ produced a startling fall in depression rates by 10%.

The authors of this new and important study conclude that their results of this new study indicate that there is no significant difference in the incidence of depression between adoptive and birth mothers. They argue this finding ‘negates the widespread assumption that postpartum depression is a direct consequence of the many and varied physiological changes that occur during pregnancy and delivery’.

Whilst many in the field may take issue with such a categorical statement there is a deeper almost philosophical point being made by this unique and valuable research about the very nature of stress.

For parents trying to adopt the arrival of a child brings with it all the stresses of the infamous ‘transition to parenthood’, and yet this event or predicament is associated with dramatic drops in rates of depression. You could almost call it a cure for depression!

So in one case someone’s stress is another’s panacea.

This suggests that stress is not something objectively ‘out there’ but is much more embedded in our interpretations of what is happening to us, and the meaning of the event. If something we are desperate for has at long last happened to us – we tend to hurdle the stress and indeed not even regard it as such.

This notion has important implications for treatment. It means that the psychological help offered to mother suffering from post-natal depression or indeed anyone suffering from stress, must include an attempt to understand their interpretation of the event as a stressful or negative one.

It shows also, terrifically positively, that we are able to cope with enormous stress depending on our approach to it. This has to be good news for all suffering from psychiatric and psychological problems, including in particular new mums.

REFERENCE

Post-adoption depression among adoptive mothers
Journal of Affective Disorders, Volume 115, Issues 1-2, May 2009, Pages 62-68 Yehuda Senecky, Hanoch Agassi, Dov Inbar, Netta Horesh, Gary Diamond, Yoav S. Bergman, Alan Apter

YET ANOTHER REASON MATERNAL DEPRESSION NEEDS URGENT TREATMENT, IF YOU NEEDED ONE

03/12/07

Raj Persaud Consultant Psychiatrist The Bethlem Royal and Maudsley NHS Hospitals Trust; Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry

When anyone gets depressed its vital to treat the illness urgently as depression has important, often devastating, effects on a person’s life. What often gets neglected though is the impact on others – mediated through relationships – of someone suffering depression. For example, given that mothers lie at the heart of families and are at the cross-section of a series of vital relationships in any family ie martial connections and parent-child affiliations, when mums get depressed the knock on effect on others is much more fundamental than is often realised by society at large or even doctors.

Now there is new research to suggest that maternal depression could have long-standing effects on children’s futures, mediated by the impact of the depression on children’s later ability to develop friendships.

Children’s social skills appear to develop out of their experience of relationships in families and these relationships are often profoundly effected by maternal mood and in particular depression.

Researchers Rachel Lucas-Thompson and Alison Clarke-Stewart from the Department of Psychology and Social Behaviour at the University of California following up a large group of children from birth found that better quality friendships at school for the children were significantly associated with better marital quality and greater attachment security within the family from early in the child’s life.

The researchers, whose paper was recently published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, point out that psychologists have become much more intrigued by what predicts children’s ability to develop friendships successfully. This is because strong friendships now appear fundamental for children's well-being. In the absence of friends, children end up lonely and suffering low self-esteem, which is bad enough, but perhaps most startling is the research finding that childrens’ friendships predicts academic performance. Those without good quality friendships actually do poorly in the longer term at school. Not having friends during childhood even predicts psychological and behaviour problems in adulthood.

Where do children learn about relationships and in particular how to conduct them? Psychological theory predicts that as children witness at first hand relationships within their family they must use these as the basis for their own grasp of how you get on with others. They will experience their own relationships with their parents and siblings but also observe the relationships between others in the family being played out before them.

Lucas-Thompson and Clarke-Stewart point out in their paper entitled ‘Forecasting friendship: The links from marital quality, maternal mood, and attachment security to children's peer relationships’ that previous research confirms that children who are securely attached to their mothers in the first year and a half are found to be more competent with peers at school in later life - they were better liked by their classmates, less socially withdrawn, more active in the peer group, less aggressive, and had more cooperative friendships.

Secure attachment by a child to a parent or ‘primary caregiver’ means that the relationship allows a child to learn that others are accessible and responsive to us and our needs. We therefore develop in this context positive expectations of others – that they will be helpful and cooperative and it’s in the context of this background that we become motivated to undertake relationships. As a result we learn to regulate our emotions and so develop socially competent interaction styles with others.

In other words we don’t throw a hissy fit because we don’t get our way because we realise there are other ways of getting what we want which are more constructive and also that this is not likely to endear us to others.

Insecure parent child relationships inevitably produce children who are less trusting of others and so find it difficult to form reliable relationships, they start from a standpoint of experiencing relationships which are not positive or supportive when it comes to their parents and so come to have that expectation of all others.

Now comes the thorny problem of an added complexity in the mix of parental attachment to children is their attachment to each other. Poor marital quality is likely to mean that parents themselves become less trusting and pessimistic about relationships and this may be transmitted to their children either directly or also indirectly because they are so preoccupied with the marital conflict this distracts them from looking after the children properly.

Psychologists do indeed find that children are more likely to have relationship problems if their parents don’t just get angry a lot but it isn’t resolved.

A depressed mother is going, according to all this theory, to have a toxic effect on their children’s relationships with friends through several mechanisms. One is that the depression might arise out of poor marital quality or may itself cause it. A depressed mother may not be able to look after her children as well as she might like to.

And as the theory predicts, Lucas-Thompson and Clarke-Stewart point out there is evidence that maternal depression in early childhood is related to children's ability to form friendships later in life. Children whose mothers experience depression during the child's early years are likely to be more aggressive and antisocial later in life – hardly endearing them to friends.

In their unique study, Lucas-Thompson and Clarke-Stewart followed up 1364 families in the USA over several years and found that a more secure attachment relationship with the mother and a more emotionally intimate relationship between the parents predicted children's positive interactions with a close friend later in life.

Lucas-Thompson and Clarke-Stewart argue that their research and other findings in the field suggest that to understand the development of children's social relationships and social skills, the mother–child relationship is not the only key, but we need to take a broader focus on the whole family system. Their research found the parent–parent relationship has a direct impact with later childrens’ friendship quality that is comparable in magnitude to that of how securely attached children felt to their parents.

The bottom line implication of this research is that maternal mood is vital to get treatment for if it’s problematic as otherwise the impact could be felt for generations to come.

REFERENCE

Forecasting friendship: The links from marital quality, maternal mood, and attachment security to children's peer relationships
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, In Press, Uncorrected Proof, Available online 19 July 2007,
Rachel Lucas-Thompson and K. Alison Clarke-Stewart

Dr Raj Persaud BSc MSc MB BS MPhil FRCPsych
Consultant Psychiatrist The Maudsley Hospital London
Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry

KEEP TAKING THE TABLOIDS?

By RAJ PERSAUD

Last week the newspaper headlines screamed and got agitated about mood disorders - it was a rare occasion when mental health was kind of dominating the news agenda all across the media for perhaps the right reasons – because of scientific research into what works and what doesn’t - rather than the more usual prompt - because of a rare and unrepresentative example of a psychiatric patient endangering a member of the public.

So those in the mental health field should be grateful – shouldn’t we?

However the headlines on closer inspection were rather worrying - ‘Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists’ was one example from a broadsheet newspaper.

The story picked up so surprisingly massively by the media was based on a paper in an otherwise rather obscure academic journal ‘PLoS Medicine’ which published an analysis that had for the first time combined the results of 47 trials on some anti-depressant drugs, including Prozac, and found only minimal benefits over placebo, except for the most depressed patients.

The significance of the analysis was not that it was comprehensive (in fact it didn’t look at any of the research done over the most recent years) - instead this was the data set that US regulators were supposed to have been paying attention to when they decided to license newer drugs for the treatment of depression back in the 1990’s.

However it appeared that some of this vital data might have been less accessible than others, and furthermore it may have been that the less flattering studies on the benefits of antidepressants may have been actively suppressed by Pharmaceutical companies. Therefore there was the suggestion of a distortion in the scientific data on which doctors and regulators are supposed to make treatment decisions, introduced by an industry which has a vested interest in getting as much medication as possible prescribed.

Unfortunately the media missed several vital points, if the truth of the treatment of mood disorders is to be properly communicated to the public, patients, therapists and doctors.

Firstly no one who knows anything about psychiatric illness could ever have suggested that prescribing a pill was ever going to be the definitive treatment of anything in the mental health field.

Psychological problems are complex and usually require a sophisticated approach that combines treatment modalities and tailors them to the specific needs of a particular patient. So no one should be at all surprised at the idea that studies which merely looked at whether anti-depressants were superior to placebos found the medication didn’t do that well. That’s because the treatment of mood problems is always about much more than just taking a pill. It should involve a range of interventions including psychotherapeutic, behavioural, family, social, stress management etc etc

Given these facts what we really need are studies that compared patients having psychological therapies combined with medication against patients have only psychological approaches and patients having just medication.

Just such a study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Martin Keller and colleagues at the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Brown University in the USA. The startling results are that among the 519 subjects who completed the study, the rates of successful response to treatment were 55 percent in the Nefazodone (anti-depressant) group and 52 percent in the psychotherapy group, as compared with 85 percent in the combined-treatment group – which was a highly statistically significant finding.

We need more research like this into the effect of combining treatments compared to just having one treatment element alone – but this kind of investigation is much more difficult to undertake, and as a consequence we don’t have nearly as many studies of this kind as we need to come to a definitive conclusion about what really works with mood disorders.

The second point is that medication in these studies is often prescribed at a standard dose in order to facilitate comparison with other medications also being trialled at the same time. These doses are rarely the effective dose that most clinicians end up using.

The prescribing of a tablet requires expert supervision and the way a medication is prescribed, what dose and how side-effects are monitored and dealt with – how the particular medication is selected and how it might be changed depending on patient response – these are all delicately handled issues which dramatically alter the impact of the pill.

This issue of physician expertise is not adequately examined in most randomised controlled trials where one standard dose or a limited range of doses tends to be deployed. For this reason anti-depressants are not likely to fare well in the laboratory and benefit from an interaction effect – the right drug in the right hands for the right patient is likely to have a much more massive effect than the wrong drug, prescribed by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, to a patient who may not suit it.

So the treatment of depression and allied conditions is much more complex than can be adequately and definitively examined by just looking at a small number of selective studies into the area.

For example a recent study published by Jørgen Bramness and colleagues at the Division of Epidemiology, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo, Norway found that the recent dramatic fall in suicide rates in Norway and its constituent counties was related to the increased sales of newer anti-depressants of the particular variety so criticised by the media last week.

The paper was recently published in the prestigious Journal of Affective Disorders and examined the sales of antidepressants and suicide rates in Norway and its counties from 1980–2004. The authors of the study pointed out that the marked recent decline in suicide rates in many countries beyond Norway has indeed appeared to be linked with the increased prescribing of newer anti-depressants. They argue that one reason for this is that the introduction of newer antidepressants, and especially the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), at the start of the 1990s accelerated the diagnosis and treatment of depression.

Studies that have examined this phenomenon across many countries have concluded that an increase of antidepressant prescribing of approximately 10% is associated with a corresponding on average 2.5 percent reduction in suicide rates.

 

Another possible reason for this however is more indirect – perhaps the introduction of the newer treatments lead to an increased awareness and more treatment optimism among family doctors who are burdened with an impossibly short time in which to wrestle with the complexities of depression, and who now believed they had a tool which was relatively easy to deploy compared to older treatments that appeared to be more problematic.

Kenneth Liu and colleagues at Merck Research Laboratories in Philadelphia, USA are about to publish a fascinating paper in the Journal of Psychiatric Research entitled ‘Is bigger better for depression trials?’ which found a significant effect on the size of a trial on its ability to detect a benefit for antidepressants. Basically the bigger the study in terms of number of patients recruited, the less likely it was to find antidepressants superior to placebos.  The authors of the study came up with a fascinating theory which is that when a study starts the first patients recruited into it tend to be most severely effected, as these are the easiest to identify, but as the pool of readily identifiable patients becomes depleted, the later patients tend to the ones probably not just much less ill, but actually probably much less likely to actually fit the bill of even having the diagnosis!

This is because those conducting the study are anxious to hit their recruitment targets and probably become much less fussy about who they get into the trial, as they find it tougher to meet the numbers required to finish the study, towards the end of the recruitment drive.

The force of this point is that randomised controlled trials in psychiatry might be more prone to be less representative of the real world than such studies done in the rest of medicine, and more prone to various biases, and therefore have to be carefully evaluated on their individual merits rather than just lumped together – as was done in the PLoS study which got all the media attention last week.

For example, there remains the thorny issue of diagnosis which was completely ignored by the media last week. There remains no blood test or x-ray or brain scan by which we can be confident those conducting a study on mood disorders are investigating the exact same diagnosis, as those performing another study elsewhere.

When it comes to diagnoses like depression the situation is particularly complicated because of the large overlap between this particular diagnosis and others – let’s just put aside the tricky issue of how confident you can be that you are diagnosing bipolar as opposed to uni-polar depression. A recent editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry by James Cole and colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry, attacked the notion that there has been any progress at all in the last few decades on improving how to make an accurate diagnosis of depression.

The editorial points out that recent research has found 72% of individuals with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) were diagnosed with concurrent depression and 48% of individuals with depression also had GAD! Many in the field are now coming to the conclusion that the word depression might be particularly unhelpful and instead suggest the umbrella term of `distress disorders' should now be deployed to cover both syndromes of depression and anxiety much more scientifically.

What all this data means is that one paper in a relatively obscure journal no matter the media hype it attracts, cannot be the definitive pronouncement on whether anyone taking an antidepressant, or considering taking one, or any other treatments for mood problems, should be browbeaten into a hasty decision.

Psychological difficulties require careful thought and consideration, basically a good therapeutic alliance between patient and doctor which allows both to openly consider a range of treatment options and to apply what we know from research to the specific instance of this particular patient with this specific disorder.

Therefore the blanket and bald decision the media made that antidepressants don’t work was so off kilter that it appeared to many of us who work in the field to be just as dreadful as the usual low standard of coverage mental health gets.

DR RAJ PERSAUD IS GRESHAM PROFESSOR FOR PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF PSYCHIATRY AND CONSULTANT PSYCHIATRIST AT THE BETHLEM ROYAL AND MAUDSLEY NHS HOSPITALS NHSTRUST