All parents want their child to be healthy and happy. Mums always prepare for the health of the baby before pregnancy. They try to keep a healthy lifestyle to ensure a healthy baby comes into the world. Don’t forget it is also very important to ensure the happiness of the baby.  The first step of preventing depression starts with Mum!

Modern Medicine holds the view that depression could be inherited, especially from the mother’s side. If the mother is depressed during the pregnancy period or has postnatal depression after the pregnancy, it is possible for the baby to inherit or be affected by the depression. The family’s influences in children’s mental health and attitudes from the time they were born until they are 5 years old is so important that it could affect them all their life.

Example 1: A few years ago, there was a young depressed person, he was born into a well educated family, and he had a very nice family environment during his childhood. However, his mum had a depression problem. He was an A grade student and lived happily and healthy at his primary school. But during the puberty when the body mobilised the energy for blood and hormones to grow, the depression gradually affected his body. It does not matter if the depression is inherited, it could easily attack us at a certain time when our body is changing, especially when there’s a change in the hormones. The smartness, talent, kindness, confidence and happy life of this good child had been gradually and completely washed away by depression. He became autistic, and he lost contact with the outside world, he considered himself being ugly, unhappy and full of resentments every day. So he complains about things already passed by, distorts the things which supposed to be positive. The good things turn out to be immoral through his own mind processing, and  what’s more, he considered himself as the victim of everything, and  worthless. So he stayed inside every day, gave himself up to daydreams, sleeping during the day and staying up at night. Gradually he lost appetite, he didn’t eat on time, his body became thinner and weaker, he couldn’t concentrate his mind and stoped going to school. A few years passed by like this.

Example 2: There was a party; a kid started crying when he came because he’s late. He started crying a second time because the juice was not what he wanted. After a while, he cried again because he thought other kids didn’t like him. He was either crying or stayed in a corner at the party, he cried when he saw other children playing. I went over and asked: “Why are you crying and unhappy? Why don’t you go and play with other children?” He answered: “Mum always cries and unhappy, she doesn’t go out to see her friends too.”  I said: “Ah!”

Young people are the hope of society, and they are the hope and treasure of their parents. Their well-being is directly linked to this hope. The physical health and mental health interacts with each other and they are indivisible. Prevention of depression starts with parents, it starts before pregnancy, after birth and with the mental and attitude family education of the kids during the years from 0 – 5.

Prevention and wisdom are the two principles of Traditional Qi.

Written by Angela Zhu (Chinese Medicine Practitioner)

Translated by Alan Huang.

© Copyright Angela Zhu 2011

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