What Men Don’t Understand About Pregnancy (Postpartum Depression)
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What is postpartum depression and why are new fathers often blamed?
Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanuja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. All right, chat, today we're going to talk about postpartum depression and postpartum parenting. So if you have a partner who's just had a kid, what should you do to support them in the best way? Now, if you're a dad out there, I think this is tricky because we're oftentimes blamed as dads and men and all men are trash and all that good stuff, which we see on social media for not being supportive enough.
But I think there are a couple of important things to remember. The first is that most of what we learn how to do, we learn from our parents. And let's say 40, 50 years ago, dads were not nearly as active as they need to be today and as expectations are high today. So oftentimes men are blamed for not providing something that no one ever taught them how to do. And that's what we're going to try to correct here today. So in the United States, there's a pretty controversial trial that's going on right now. A woman named Lindsay Clancy is on trial for murder after killing her three children. And her defense, which there's ample evidence for, is that she had severe postpartum depression that turned into postpartum psychosis.
And psychosis is when you have like a break from reality. And during her psychotic period, she actually killed her three children and then jumped out of a window on some high story and is now paralyzed from the sternum down. And so I think like, you know, we have this legal defense of like, yeah, I'm not responsible because I'm insane. And I think postpartum psychosis is like one of those diagnoses that that defense is kind of for, because we know that in psychosis, you literally have a break from reality. You think that, you know, you've been possessed by the devil and you really believe that and you act accordingly. And this has created a lot of problems on the Internet. People are breaking up over it, like women are supporting Lindsay Clancy.
A lot of men are like really confused by this. I think a lot of people don't understand what psychosis really is. And they sort of think about it as like depression or anxiety where you're still tethered to reality. The really scary thing about this is also that she was in psychiatric treatment. So she was declining and getting worse. She saw, I think, seven health care providers, was hospitalized at some point, was prescribed 13 medications. So she was trying to get help. People were trying to help. helper and this still happened and that's kind of why i'm making this video today because i think the postpartum period is like really hard to manage and part of the reason it's hard to manage is because if you're a dude you were never taught how to take care of your wife in the postpartum period because there's a really good chance that your dad was not super active in the postpartum period or maybe you were a little baby so you didn't really observe it and so it's like really hard to know what to do as a dad it's a really scary situation and
And what I see most dads do is they try their best and they actually do try, but they actually don't know what the goal is. So parents, you need to do two basic things. One is support self-efficacy, which is kind of like interesting. So it's not just that you need to do work, but the primary mental health goal is to help your partner feel like a good mother. So it's not to like assuage her concerns about appearance and things like that. Like if she asks you like, hey, is the baby weight gone? That's like a debate, right? There's no right answer to that. And so there's all this stuff that we're kind of like scared as dudes. Like, oh, my God, like, what do I say? Like, the baby weight isn't gone. Like, how do I proceed with this?
So this is where the main goal is to support her self-efficacy.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is postpartum depression and why are new fathers often blamed?
0:03–4:42
2
How does the Lindsay Clancy case illustrate postpartum psychosis?
4:42–9:10
3
What are the two core goals for dads to support a partner with postpartum depression?
9:10–13:03
4
Which warning signs should dads watch for to spot postpartum depression or psychosis?
13:03–16:24
5
How can fathers build a partner’s self‑efficacy through practical help?
16:24–20:10
6
Why is sleep the most critical resource for a postpartum mother?
20:10–24:05
7
How does redefining masculinity help dads handle the identity shift of fatherhood?
24:05–27:58
8
What actionable steps can dads take today to become effective postpartum supporters?
27:58–31:42