I wanted to write an article about web resources for fathers suffering from depression. Problem is, there is only a limited area of depression that gets talked about in relation to dads, and a lot of that material tries to get new fathers to understand postpartum depression in their wives, though medical research has begun to suggest that fathers also suffer from it.
As far as fathers are concerned, what I’ve read about is the adjustment issue: how you are supposed to adjust to your wife’s new relationships – with her baby and with you. Fathers have a lot of mixed emotions in those first few months, and, being guys, they are less likely to seek out help from a person or a magazine (or a web site). Look around the news stand; it’ll take you a while to find one for dads.
I’m not dismissing the content of the information that is out there. It is good for a father to learn as much as he can about all the changes his wife is going through, and it is also important that a new dad recognize that he has feelings he needs to address. My concern is that there’s always more to it than just these areas.
I can get depressed very easily, and some of it has to do with my being a father, wondering if I’m good enough to do it, if I’m providing enough materially for my family, all that stuff. There’s a little bit of traditional machismo as well, though I’ve shed a lot of the garbage that such an attitude entails. And, naturally, there’s stuff that is rooted in life experiences from long before I became a parent. But when you look at the literature that is out there for fathers and depression, you realize that there’s a dearth of information, compared to what is out there for mothers.
I’m cognizant of the history of psychoanalysis to understand that the field was very unkind to women for a long time – after all, the word “hysteria” comes from the Greek word for “womb”; the medical authorities, long ago, equated irrationality with being female. So the changes and benefits to how women – especially mothers – are treated for mental illnesses are enormous and important.
But we have been slow to see the pressures of modern-day parenting have had on the fathers. Let me point out just a few key problems:
1) The Job Market: let’s say, dad, that you’re still the sole wage-earner in your family, like your father was and maybe his father before him. Your life, your career, is still not going to be the same, and you know it. My father could reasonably believe that he would stay with the same employer for his entire career, like many of his generation. I don’t believe that for a moment; I have yet to find anything close to permanent employment, and I’m almost forty. Granted, by that age my father had a son entering college, while I still have one figuring out the potty, but that’s a function of when each of us became parents. And most in my generation don’t expect the job market to be as steady as it was three or four or five decades ago. I think this realism/cynicism can wear down on you.
2) Social role confusion: we have begun to transform – again, for we are always transforming – the social roles each family member has, in particular parents. The problem is that when today’s dads look at role models of fathers, those role models don’t compare to what fathers are expected to do today. This is why it requires a lot of serious thinking for dads, because they don’t see themselves as caregivers in the same way they might remember their own fathers in that role.
3) Powerlessness: the economic changes and social changes can lead to a sense of powerlessness, a lack of control over one’s life. Of course, most people don’t have a lot of control over their lives, when they really stop and think about it, but we generally tend to think that we get along well enough on a day-to-day basis. But all sorts of events have shown us that we are completely at the mercy of random fate. Think of it this way: four or five or six hundred years ago, there might have been a terrible storm or tsunami that wiped out as many lives as more recent natural disasters, but if it did not happen in our geographical region, we might not ever know about it. Our media-saturated culture gives us so much information that we learn more about the wrath of nature, the hatred of extremist groups, the greed of corporate thieves. These things have existed in many ways for a long time, but we can see it close-up on our screens. This can be important and even empowering, as the Civil Rights movement showed in the fifties and sixties, but often it leads to a sense of despair. This is true for all of us, of course, and I would add that a post-Sept 11 world feels a lot less stable to us, for many reasons. How can I raise my children in a world like this, dads ask. A classmate of mine speculated about this in an editorial column he writes for the local paper. While his final words reflected the miracle of the birth of his young son, the realities of everyday life make it hard to sustain that determination. And a sense of powerlessness can lead to all kinds of reactions, from catatonia to, well, joining extremist groups.
If you read the Mental Health blog, I’m sure you’ll find a lot of useful resources, and the general information about depression and bipolar disorder (what used to be called “manic depression” – somehow I can’t imagine Hendrix writing a song called “bipolar disorder,” Talking Heads maybe…) is important. I just sometimes wonder if anyone is doing more research on fathers and how they cope with depression.