Dads get this too, and almost nobody checks

If you are the father or the non-birthing parent and you have been feeling like you are the problem — short-tempered, checked out, drinking more, staying late at work because home has become something to survive — this page is about you, not about her.

Paternal postnatal depression is real, it is common, and it is almost never screened for. Estimates vary by study, but somewhere around one in ten fathers experiences it, with some reviews putting the rate considerably higher. Nobody hands you a questionnaire at the six-week check, because the six-week check is not yours.

It usually does not look like sadness

This is the part that keeps men out of treatment. The picture everyone has of depression is crying and lying down. What clinicians actually describe in fathers is:

• Anger that is out of proportion — snapping at her, at the baby's crying, at traffic.
• Irritability that sits under everything, all day.
• Withdrawing: longer hours, more screens, more gaming, more time in the car outside the house.
• Drinking more, or using something to take the edge off.
• Recklessness, or a sudden pull toward blowing something up in your life.
• Feeling numb rather than sad, and feeling nothing much for the baby.

If you read that list and recognised yourself, you have not discovered that you are a bad man. You have discovered a symptom cluster with a name and a treatment.

What raises the risk

• Her having depression or anxiety. The single strongest predictor of a father's is the mother's — this is not two separate problems.
• Your own history of depression or anxiety at any point in your life.
• Sleep deprivation, which does the same thing to your brain that it does to hers.
• Money pressure, and the feeling that you cannot stop or slow down.
• A birth that frightened you. Fathers get birth trauma too, and are almost never asked about it.
• Having no one to say any of this to.

What to do about it

The same things that work for her work for you: talking therapy, sometimes medication, sleep, and telling one person the truth. The barrier is not that treatment is unavailable. It is that nobody offers it to you, so you have to ask.

• Tell your own GP or doctor — not hers. Say: “My partner had a baby a few months ago and I'm not right. I'm angry all the time and I don't feel like myself.”
• Postpartum Support International runs free online support groups specifically for dads, and has a helpline that will talk to you.
• Tell one friend the actual sentence rather than the joke version of it.
• If you are drinking to get through the evenings, say that out loud to someone. It is the symptom most likely to be treated as a separate problem when it is not.

One more thing, and it matters

Getting yourself treated is not a distraction from looking after her. A father's depression affects the mother's recovery and the baby's development, and the reverse is also true. You are not a support beam that is not allowed to need anything. You are the second parent, and there are two of you to look after.