Dynamics of Postnatal Depressive Symptoms in Early Parenthood

Background: New mothers and fathers are at risk of developing postnatal depressive problems. To understand how postnatal depressive symptoms unfold over time, analyses at the within-person level are necessary. Inspecting postnatal depressive problems at the symptom level provides a novel perspective, ultimately offering insight into which symptoms contribute to the elevation of other symptoms over time. Methods: Panel graphical autoregressive models were applied to analyze the within-person temporal and contemporaneous relations between depressive symptoms across the postnatal period in new mothers and fathers (at T1; Nmothers = 869, Nfathers = 579). Depressive symptoms were repeatedly assessed at 6-, 12-, and 18-months postpartum, using the Edinburgh postnatal depression scale. Results: The results revealed that for mothers, sadness was a key symptom predicting symptom increases in multiple other depressive symptoms over time as well as an autoregressive effect, with anxiousness predicting somewhat fewer symptom changes. For fathers, the most central symptom was being anxious, while self-blame and being overwhelmed had strong self-maintaining roles in the fathers’ symptomatology, indicating that these could be key features in fathers experiencing postnatal depressive problems. The symptoms that mothers and fathers experience simultaneously (within time) displayed a more similar symptom pattern.Conclusions: This study suggests that across the postnatal period, depressive symptoms in mothers and fathers contribute differently to the alleviation of depressive problems, highlighting sad mood as a key feature in maternal symptomatology and anxiousness components in paternal symptomatology.