Moms’ depression affects babies’ language development – but so does anti-depressant drug – research shows

Janet Werker and her colleagues played recordings to babies when they were still in the womb.

Then the University of British Columbia psychologist and her team tested babies’ ability to discriminate between English and French when the infants were just six and 10 months old.

The findings, published Monday, are striking.

Both maternal depression, which affects up to 20 per cent of pregnant women, and treating mothers with a common anti-depressant drug threw off infants’ language development, Werker and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Harvard University report in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Babies of depressed mothers were slow to reach language development “milestones,” they report. And babies of mothers taking antidepressants known as serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) reached milestones months early, they report.