Rant Stealing Post Natal Depression

Does anyone else feel like this will become a new way to be incompetent and shirk childcare responsibilities?

YES. Yes. Yes. Damn it, "postpartum" means "having given birth", this is applicable only to women who have just had a baby. Men may get PTSD from watching a traumatic birth, or may get situational depression struggling to adjust to fatherhood, but they cannot get postpartum depression. I will die on this hill. No man has the first fucking clue what any of this feels like, the hormonal stuff in pregnancy and immediately postpartum is INTENSE. I was just about ready to literally bite people the day my milk came in, and I'm usually pretty level-headed and laid-back. I have never felt more animal than I did from about 30 weeks of pregnancy until baby was eating solids. Men have, what, a slight testosterone drop? Aww, poor babies. Meanwhile we restructure our whole brains (permanently!), our breasts change comprehensively to make milk, and NBD, just grow a whole new person (or people, hats off to mothers of multiples), and all being well push them out of our bodies at vast physical effort.

If today's crop of man-babies feels like fatherhood is hard work, boo fucking hoo, try being a mother and doing it all including managing man-baby's moods for him while passing lime-sized clots and trying to get the hang of breastfeeding a squalling infant and being condescended to by medical professionals.

Damn it all, I want to see men fucking growing a pair and taking their fair share of responsibility. This man-baby/playboy/peter pan BS can go fly a kite somewhere. And my Nigel is pretty good, he's a better father than I am a mother sometimes, but being a mother is way harder so I'm cutting myself some slack there, but every motherhood forum anywhere is full of women who effectively don't have a husband, they have an extra adult child and it kills me.

Men can have cramps, but they can't experience menstrual cramps because they don't menstruate.

Men can have anxiety and depression, but they can't experience PPA and PPD because they don't give birth.

Men's issues need to be addressed but independently of labels that do not and cannot apply to them.

Really hard to find the energy to care about men's mental health at this point.

They don't take care of themselves. They don't bother developing any resilience or coping skills. They don't do the work of introspection nor do they bother to build insight into others. Most of them won't even book their own therapy appointments.

They perpetuate the myth that men are "less emotional" and that men "bottle things up" despite thousands of years of proof positive that the reverse is true. They bully each other for any hint of emotional intelligence or fundamental human empathy.

Men have more resources, more freedoms, and more power to solve these problems than women do. Women are not the ones putting any barriers in their way.

For myself, I will be willing to pitch in and help men with their mental health problems just as soon as I'm done helping all the women who are recovering from the harms inflicted upon them by men with mental health problems.

Is this something feminists are supposed to fix too?

Like lonely men, male suicide, male lack of sex, etc?

Maybe the men whose activism solely consists of derailing women talking about Women’s issues and policing our speech with’namalt’ and ‘women rape too’ could put some energy to mens legit causes

Situational depression is a thing, but I don't see why men have to steal postpartum depression. That's a specific thing that happens in some women's bodies after giving birth. Yet I have seen actual medical websites refer to postpartum depression in men.... It feels wrong to me too.

Men trying to claim ppd has been going on for years and it pisses me off every single time I hear about it. If ya didn't give birth, ya don't have post partum anything. You might have garden variety depression/anxiety, you might have trouble adjusting to major life changes, sure you might even have PTSD, but you aren't postpartum so stop trying to appropriate words that describe a uniquely female experience.

PTSD from witnessing a traumatic birth isn't PPD. Letting them take yet another thing that only women can experience is just more evidence that we live in a patriarchy and only their feefees matter.

Men get whatever they want just by slightly whining. Pathetic this was given any airtime.

I’ve only ever known men become seriously depressed after a new baby comes home because something traumatic happened to mum whilst she gave birth. I do remember reading an awful story of a guy who’s wife had literally just given birth, he noticed something was odd with her and was trying to get the doctors attention, she basically went into cardiac arrest in front of him (I think if I remember correctly she also had a seizure), he got thrown out of the delivery room whilst they resuscitated her. He essentially paced the hallway thinking his wife was dying and there was nothing he could do. She recovered and was actually fine by the time she went home and had very little recollection of what happened to her but he had horrible nightmares and was racked with guilt that through the whole ordeal he didn’t even think about if his son was okay he just fell to bits thinking he was loosing his wife.

But in situations like that I think it’s most likely that they end up with PTSD. I imagine guys who’s wives and girlfriends have relatively smooth births don’t experience anything near to that, maybe a bit of shock when the baby first comes home or the realisation of becomming a dad hits them

It’s nothing like postpartum depression, I’m sick of these men thinking women are getting some kinda princess treatment

This absolutely infuriates me because the scant resources for ppd will end up going more to men than women (as usual). I have PPD, my nigel might have trauma from the last birth because I had an emergency c section at 34 weeks, but he’s also painfully squeamish and almost fainted during it. He might also have trauma from living the nicu life with me for a month. But he doesn’t have ppd. It’s impossible. He’s never been postpartum.

Listening to men complaining that it was hard to see their partner in pain doesn’t fill me with sympathy for anyone except the labouring woman.

And I cannot comprehend how a man can seriously complain about that. It's so whiny and entitled. I would be ashamed to utter such a complaint.

I mean, I am an extremely oversensitive person and actually do avoid even novels with bad endings because feeling empathy is so taxing.

But, like ... demanding psychotherapy or any kind of treatment for that? Really?

The only time I would ever not point and laugh at a man complaining how hard it was for him would be if he tried to get his fellow men to care about women by pointing out how it affects him.

"Can't we have better maternal healthcare? I felt so bad when my partner didn't get any kind of anesthetic during birth, that really should be fixed."

Cause, sad though it is, that might actually work better than getting the men in power to feel empathy for women.

Otherwise, though?

It's just utterly ridiculous.