Are female humans are the only mammals that suffer from post-natal depression?
– Well this is an interesting one. Ive been doing a bit digging around and actually, there is some evidence that some animals can have post-natal depression. The main animals that have been looked at are rats and mice because they’ve mainly been used as laboratory models for humans and they do find that rats can show depressive symptoms, things like poor nursing, signs of stress and anxiety after birth and they were also quite useful, you can manipulate the hormone levels in rats to bring on post-natal depression type symptoms and theres some labs that are doing this and are trying to test interventions and ways to help reduce this because its definitely thought that changing hormone levels, increases in cortisol, drops in females sex hormones help to bring on this kind of problem. There are some interesting mice models as well; particularly mice who have faults in their GABA receptors in their brain on their brain cells and the nerve cells are much more likely to show these kind of de
