We gave pregnant women in the lab a color-word matching test. Health & Disease Five mysteries about breast milk How did you first try to study whether a woman’s mental state can affect her fetus? This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Monk spoke with Knowable about the evidence so far, and why she sees this link between a woman and her child’s mental health as a prime opportunity for preventive care - and not a reason to blame Mom. She recently coauthored a review in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology describing the mechanisms by which a mother’s mental state may shape her fetus’ developing brain. Monk began working with pregnant patients early in her clinical career, and she has spent more than 20 years researching the effects of maternal stress, depression and anxiety on offspring. And a burgeoning body of evidence shows that a pregnant woman’s psychological health can influence that of her child’s.
But a woman’s mental health is an integral part of her fetus’ environment, explains Catherine Monk, a medical psychologist at Columbia University in New York. CREDIT: JAMES PROVOST (CC BY-ND) Medical psychologist Catherine Monkīut what about a mother’s mental health? Until recently, researchers thought that this had an effect only after birth - that if a mother’s poor emotional well-being led to neglectful or abusive parenting, it increased her child’s risk of psychological disorders such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety or other conditions.
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