by Tanja Jensen
Credit to GaborfromHungary
Nasal spray with the ´love´ hormone oxytocin seems to help depressed moms to better bond with their newborn baby. This is promising news, since moms with postnatal depression lack oxytocin. The hormone plays an important role in mother-infant bonding, with lasting effects on the child´s social development, such as social engagement with others and their capacity for empathy.
To simplify treatment of postnatal moms, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp and his team at Washington State University in USA and University of Trieste in Italy, bridged neuroscience and psychology. The research team believes these disciplines complement each other and, therefore, bridged certain aspects of emotional brain issues with psychoanalytical concepts about how the mind works.
Oxytocin, is well known to strengthen social behavior and, in particular, have antidepressant effects. The hormone, which is active in the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) also raises people´s feelings of commitment, in the sense that the hormone seems important to lower self-centered activities in moms and strengthen their concern along with confidence to handle the baby´s needs.
Oxytocin strengthens social behavior
Based on these effects, Panksepp and his team wanted to find out whether oxytocin could have any therapeutic effect on moms with postnatal depression, that is, depression and other symptoms like flattened affect and irritability, appearing within a few weeks after giving birth.
The researchers therefore studied 16 moms for 12 weeks. All the moms took part in psychotherapy once weekly and also used nasal spray with either oxytocin or placebo.
Strikingly, there was no difference on depressive symptoms between the moms in the two groups. Instead, Panksepp and his colleagues realized that oxytocin lowered the mom´s narcissistic, or self-centered, trait.
Postnatal depression seems to
include a disturbed sense of self
It turns out that oxytocin eased acceptance of and interaction with the newborn. This improved the mom´s ability to recognize her baby´s needs. So what is generally defined as postnatal depression, in fact, also seems to include a disturbed sense of self, or narcissistic balance. And oxytocin counteracts this. At least as it seems.
Although Pankseep and the team did a small study, it still serves as a pointer. The researchers showed that oxytocin might ease the self-centered dimension of postnatal depression, rather than the depressive symptom itself. If the results are confirmed, then preventive measures could be implemented as treatment. This means that mom´s and their infants could get help to bond during a critical time that tends to affect the rest of the child´s life.
The paper was recently published in Frontiers in Psychology.
Beautiful Brain 