Mental illness strikes babies, too
Babies and toddlers are too young to take Prozac or complain about
their childhoods, but psychologists are finding their tender age doesn't
protect them from mental illness.
Children under the age of 3 can suffer from
symptoms of depression, including disruptions in eating and
sleep. In recent years, researchers have discovered the youngest
humans can even suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, once
thought to be only an illness of adults.
"The picture has totally changed," says Alicia Lieberman,
director of the Child Trauma Research Project at San Francisco
General Hospital.
Although much of psychology is built upon the
influences of childhood, psychologists haven't always paid much
attention to the earliest years of a child's life. Only in the
late 1960s and 1970s did researchers begin to understand the
importance of the relationships between infants and those who
take care of them, says Alice Sterling Honig, professor emerita
of child development at Syracuse University.
Researchers watched how infants reacted when their parents
went to the hospital and found signs of trouble. "First, the
little babies would protest enormously and search around
frantically," Honig says. "But after a while, they'd go into a
despair and withdraw and look listless, with dull eyes, as if
they gave up looking for their special person."
Parents who continually fail to create a bond of trust
with their babies may doom them to lives of insecurity, Honig
adds: "You're not going to have this feeling of trusting that
someone is really for you. There's a lot of continuity from
infancy all the way to people who [grow up] and ask: 'Do you
love me?' 'How come you didn't call me yesterday?' And 'I saw
you looking at that woman!'"
Psychologists, of course, can't ask infants how
they feel. "We don't put babies on couches," Lieberman says.
Instead, they rely on instinct and a guide to symptoms of mental
health problems among children up to age 3. The guide, by the
infant advocacy group Zero to Three, is similar to the popular
DSM-IV, a handbook of psychological disorders among older
children and adults.
Even without a guide, many psychologists can detect
problems in a baby by just looking at him or her, Lieberman
says. Stressed-out babies look "sad, withdrawn, frightened and
disorganized."
As young as 4 months, mentally ill babies won't
smile or laugh, she says, and they may show signs of stress seen
in much older people - digestive problems and weight loss.
As they get older, toddlers who have been exposed to
severe stress reveal the after-effects through "post-traumatic
play," Lieberman explains. "Their play is rigid and repetitious.
They'll repeat the same thing again and again, going over and
over it, and there is no emerging. The child cannot get out of
it. He's trying, but he cannot."
While experts think they're getting a better handle
on diagnosing mental problems facing very young children,
treatment remains a challenge. Without the benefit of drugs or
psychotherapy, counselors can only change the lives of infants
by convincing their caregivers to do things differently.
"You cannot do therapy unless you work with the
mother and child, father and child, grandmother and child, or
whatever," Honig says.
Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a child psychiatrist at George
Washington University, says researchers are teaching parents and
other caregivers to adjust how they interact with an infant
depending how he or she reacts to sensations. A hypersensitive
baby who's sensitive to noise and sound might need extra
soothing and comforting, for example.
Therapists must often teach parents to compliment their
infants instead of criticize them and make sure the kids feel
safe in times of stress, Honig says. In some cases, parents fail
the task because they are too focused on their professional
lives and can't "unarmor" when they get home, she says.
Whatever the treatment, experts agree that helping
infants handle the challenges of life will pay off down the
line. "The biggest myth is that it doesn't make a difference
what you do in the early years, that people's traits are genetic
and you can't have a favorable influence," Greenspan says.
"That's not true."