Depression Treatment of Mothers' Improves Child Behavior

Treatment of maternal depression enhances their kids behavior and if the mothers don't get better, these kids' problems also worsens, says study.

"If you treat the mother when she is depressed and don't even go through the process of treating the children of these mothers, they still get better as their mothers get better," said Madhukar Trivedi, professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern and a co-author of the study.

Depression - Types, Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment
Depression is one of the most common mental disorders affecting approximately 340 million people in the world. No one is immune from depression - it occurs in people of all social classes, all countries and all cultural settings.

"While the effect in the short term is clearly robust, the bigger issue is that this effect is long-lasting," he said.

"One year after their mothers' remissions, these children continued to show further improvement. This is almost unbelievable."

Moms and their children were followed as part of the nation's largest multisite clinical trial on treatments for depression, begun in fall 1999.

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The latest findings also showed that children's improvement, in terms of both depressive symptoms and social functioning, was related to the time it took their mothers to get better.

Children whose mothers remitted - or recovered from all depressive symptoms - early within the first three months of treatment continued to show improvements in both symptoms and social functioning more than a year later.

How to Handle Depression
Few tips that could help you to manage depression. It is ok to be moody once in a while but if you feel moody for a longer period of time then it could be depression.

If their mothers' remission took longer than three months, children a year later showed improvement in depressive symptoms, but not as much in social functioning.

The study was published recently in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Depressed Mums Increase Babies' Stress Hormones
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Source-ANI

Depression Treatment of Mothers' Improve Child Behavior