How Mental Health Unfolds

Click here to view a video on the foundations of mental health.

The birth process represents yet another crucial health marker. During the critical hours following birth, close contact with the baby – touching, stroking, cuddling, seeing and smelling – is regarded as essential in fostering a secure attachment and subsequent mental health. Mother-Infant attachment is often referred to as maternal bonding. Skin-to-skin contact, soon after delivery, is regarded as essential to the bonding process.

Deepak Chopra, in his bestselling book, 'Ageless Body, Timeless Mind', provides us with some astonishing insights into the physiological implications of the bonding process:

“If newborns are touched, caressed, their levels of growth hormone increase and the protective coating of the motor nerves, myelin, become thicker. A mother’s loving urge to cuddle her baby translates directly into life-assuring biochemical reactions. Babies deprived of loving attention can become emotionally stunted or dysfunctional. In experiments with rhesus monkeys, newborns were taken away from their mothers and provided with a choice of two artificial substitutes – either a cold, wire-mesh model with a bottle sticking out in the middle or a plush, warm and soft ‘mother’ even though it did not give food. The instinct for emotional nourishment proved more powerful than did that for physical nourishment.“

Research has established that baby mice, when separated from their mothers during the first two weeks of life, had impaired immune systems as adults, leaving them vulnerable to disease and premature death. Another study found that, when baby rabbits where regularly cuddled, hugged and stroked by humans, they (as opposed to a control group that did not receive this treatment) lived longer, registered lower cholesterol and blood pressure readings and were sexually more active and less ‘neurotic’ (tame?) than the control group.

Consider two very different scenarios to a baby in distress. In our first scenario, a baby awakens in the early hours of the morning and starts crying. The first mother, let’s call her the caring mother, gently and lovingly holds and rocks the baby until it drifts back to sleep. In our second scenario, the rejecting mother responds to a crying infant by picking it up and without caress scolds the baby. The baby, sensing the mother’s irritability and lack of affection, stiffens and experiences more distress. Our rejecting mother places the baby back in its crib and lets him cry until he eventually falls asleep. Naturally, as a once-off experience, neither of these examples will influence an infant’s health status. But when these (contrasting) maternal attitudes are repeated, it will foster – according to child psychologists – very different feelings in a toddler about herself and her relationships with significant others, with implications for later mental health status.

The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, repeatedly emphasised that the first five years of life are of importance in setting the stage for psychological wellbeing. According to developmental psychologists, the infant’s brain grows to about two thirds of its full size during the first three or four years. It is during this critical period that the young and malleable brain may experience ‘stunted’ growth. Parental neglect can lead to high stress levels, impairing the brain’s learning centres and, in the process, damage the intellect. Following this line of enquiry, recent research suggests that neglected children demonstrate lower levels of mental health: anxiety, apathy, aggression and reduced ability to concentrate.

Bonding, Early Life Experiences and Later Mental Health Status

Research suggests that inadequate bonding between mother and infant may impede the child’s intellectual, emotional and social development with negative implications for subsequent mental health status. Wayne Weiten puts it this way:

“Dysfunctions in the early parent-child interactions and/or attachment bond set the stage for later peer rejection, anti-social behaviour, coping difficulties and difficulties with bonding with their own infants later. Early bonding serves as an organising feature for social, cognitive, perceptual and attentional processes…”

The foundations of your ability to tolerate stress are at least in part, established early on, and include:

• Your genetic inheritance
• Love and acceptance
• Family stability
• Diet