Mother Confesses to Murdering 1 Year-Old Son: "I Hated My Child Since The Day He Was Born"

Why didn't she get an abortion in the first place?

Depression can be a bitch, and make you do some damaging things to you and others. It's a sad thing a little child lost his life.

There are women who love being pregnant and getting all the attention but once they realize parenthood isn't all Kodak moments and all those fawning people disappear when you need a baby sitter along with the crazy hormones/depression things like this can happen.

I need more information...like was she mental before the kid, was she forced to have it (not allowed an abortion), did her family prevent her from giving it up for adoption, was the child planned, did she have proper education to spot post-partum?

This is one aspect of pregnancy that needs far more recognition. However, we need to recognize that depression is a mental illness.... and one that we really don't understand or have many effective ways to diagnose until after a tragedy has occurred.

Some causes of depression can be linked to hormone imbalance, but there are also many other factors to be considered.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/16/genetic-link-to-depressio_n_862329.html

The researchers said they hoped the findings would bring scientists closer to developing more effective treatments for patients with depression, since currently available medicines for depression only work in around half of patients.

Both studies were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on Monday and both teams reported a strong link between depression and genetic variations in a region called chromosome 3p25-26.

Major depression affects about 20 percent of people at some point in their lives. Severe and recurring depression affects up to 4 percent of people and is notoriously hard to treat.

The World Health Organization has forecast that depression will rival heart disease as the health disorder with the highest disease burden in the world by 2020.

According to a 2006 study, depression is responsible for 100 million lost working days a year in England and Wales alone at a cost of 9 billion pounds ($14.6 billion).

Studies of families with depression have indicated that the disorder has a genetic link and scientists think around 40 percent of the risk of developing it is contributed by genes, with the rest down to environmental and other external factors.

"We are just beginning to make our way through the maze of influences on depression and this is an important step toward understanding what may be happening at the genetic and molecular levels," Michele Pergadia, who worked on Washington University study, said in a statement about the findings.

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http://www.womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fact-sheet/depression-pregnancy.cfm#b

What causes depression? What about postpartum depression?

There is no single cause. Rather, depression likely results from a combination of factors:

• Depression is a mental illness that tends to run in families. Women with a family history of depression are more likely to have depression.
• Changes in brain chemistry or structure are believed to play a big role in depression.
• Stressful life events, such as death of a loved one, caring for an aging family member, abuse, and poverty, can trigger depression.
• Hormonal factors unique to women may contribute to depression in some women. We know that hormones directly affect the brain chemistry that controls emotions and mood. We also know that women are at greater risk of depression at certain times in their lives, such as puberty, during and after pregnancy, and during perimenopause. Some women also have depressive symptoms right before their period.

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Depression (whether treated with medication or not) during pregnancy can have a negative impact on the fetus.

Poor neonatal adaptation has been reported in some babies following in utero exposure to antidepressants, with increased admissions to neonatal intensive care units. ¹¹ Clinical manifestation of poor neonatal adaptation includes such usually transient and self-limiting symptoms as jitteriness, tachycardia, hypothermia, vomiting, hypoglycemia, irritability, constant crying, increased tonus, eating and sleeping difficulties, convulsions and respiratory distress. This pattern of symptoms may occur in up to 30 per cent of all babies exposed to SSRIs during late pregnancy.

By contrast, for women with untreated depression, the child’s global IQ and language development showed negative effects in relation to the duration of the depression and the number of postnatal depressive episodes. These results suggest that children of mothers with depression have decreased global IQ and language development as compared to children of non-depressed women. ¹² Another study found similar results: in a case where internalizing behaviours (e.g., depression, anxiety and withdrawal) were examined in four-year-old children of mothers who had taken SSRIs while pregnant, the mother’s impaired mood had an identified impact on her child.

http://www.camh.net/Publications/Resources_for_Professionals/Pregnancy_Lactation/per_antidepressants.html#fetal