Depression in a Warrior Father

While perinatal depression in men is not unknown and is occasionally mentioned in the literature, we do not have clear models for intensive treatment when the depression is immobilizing and persistent. This article follows the progress of a man who collapsed in the final month of his partner’s pregnancy for their first child, through a hospitalization and a period of psychotropic drugs, discovery of the meaning of his depression, and eventual recovery. While this clinician approaches perinatal depression as a non-random event—indeed, likely full of meaning related to the coming child and, possibly, to the patient’s own early life—no overarching model for treatment is proposed, except for this one: that depression in pregnancy and after the birth of a child is never innocuous, and that outcome is often enhanced when we join the patient in the search for its meaning