“Depression in babies is the same as in adults, with the same symptoms: lack of interest in relationships, irritability, sleep disturbances and crying”

In early childhood, which ranges from 0 to 3 years old, children need to establish relationships of strong emotional attachment to a small set of reference figures who provide them with security, who act as a refuge, who comfort them and respond to their needs, in an individualized way.

“Babies have no need to socialize with others or play. They need to have someone who can relate to them, who is available to them and this is done in a one-to-one relationship. (…). It’s a relationship that takes time to build. It’s something that has to be repeated, repeated, repeated for the baby to start organizing memories and anticipating what is going to happen, starting to create an idea of ​​how people work”, says the director of the Hospital’s Early Childhood Unit Dona Estefânia, in Lisbon.

In this sense, early entry into a daycare center, where babies spend the entire day in groups and with little individualized attention, is not positive and can even “leave marks”, argues the specialist, considering that this “exposes babies to a situation of continued chronic stress”.

“An individual custody relationship is better than a group relationship. If we have a very good nanny and a very good nursery, a nanny is preferable”, he highlights.

According to the child psychiatrist, failure to establish “secure emotional bonds at an early age leaves physical scars in the brain, with changes in neuronal networks, which translate into changes in behavior”.

It is known that experiencing traumatic situations in early childhood not only increases the child’s risk of developing suffer from mental disorders throughout their lives, as well as suffering from certain physical illnesses.

“Adverse experiences in childhood, such as family conflict or physical abuse, humiliation, abandonment and relational insufficiency, are directly related to the increased risk for hypertension, diabetes, cancer or alcoholism. The body keeps memories of these traumatic experiences and there are consequences later”, he warns.

But the effects don’t just appear in the long term. Depression can set in from a very early age and with symptoms similar to those in adults, namely “ofdisinterest in the relationship, which is manifested by a avoidance of gaze, little involvement with others, irritability, frequent crying, few expressions of joy, changes in sleep and appetite, an apparent delay in development due to anhedonia, and lack of desire to explore the world”.

In the interview, Pedro Caldeira da Silva tells the story of a baby just four months old, the youngest “patient” he observed with symptoms of depression and who had to undergo “psychological resuscitation”.

The specificities of treatment in early childhood was one of the topics covered in this episode, which also looked at how some neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism, can manifest themselves from the first months of life.