Mental illness strikes babies, researchers say
 

By RANDY DOTINGA
HealthScoutNews

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. 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 in later life, 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, said Alice Sterling Honig, a child development professor at Syracuse University.

Researchers watched how infants reacted when their parents went to the hospital. "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 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 Stressed-out babies look "sad, withdrawn, frightened and disorganized."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.

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