REVIEW: Even the Darkest Night: A Father’s Journey of Hope and Healing from Paternal Depression by Christopher Choukalas, MD

Reviewed by Anna Rollins

The term ‘postpartum depression’ often evokes the image of a mother. Perhaps we conceive of a housebound woman with sweaty hair twisted in a messy knot, breasts engorged, pelvic floor prolapsed, as she rocks a crying baby unable to be soothed. A mother is, after all, the one who’s had her body broken open from the experience of birth.

But to exclusively center mothers in the discussion of postpartum mental health would be to turn a blind eye to the very real struggles of fathers whose lives (and hormones!) are also upended after childbirth. It is this under-discussed, though incredibly common, condition of paternal postpartum depression that physician Christopher Choukalas narrates in his memoir, Even the Darkest Night: A Father’s Journey of Hope and Healing from Paternal Depression (Harmony, 2026).

Choukalas’s memoir begins with a birth that almost results in death. His wife, Lindsey, hemorrhaged significantly after delivering their twin daughters. As he watched her fight for her life, he grieved the potential loss of his partner and feared the responsibility of caring for two infants alone. Though Lindsey survives and thrives after the traumatic birth, Choukalas struggles significantly.

Choukalas’s narrative is structured with the inciting incident of the traumatic birth, the fallout of his own mental health, and then his recovery. On his path to recovery, he utilizes both therapeutic and pharmaceutical support. He invites the reader into his childhood wounds: a coming-of-age steeped in poverty after being abandoned by his father and raised by a single mother who was forced to overwork herself to make ends meet. This—his fear of becoming the same sort of father he had, a father who abandoned his children—is something Choukalas skillfully grapples with in the narrative.

With unflinching honesty, he both indicts and empathizes with his father who left him as a child. Describing his life before marriage and children, he writes, “I was angry and I was a yeller, too. I’d thrown things. I’d broken furniture, the whole deal. Now add a kid into the mix, and ‘I wouldn’t have been ready for it’ is like saying a tree isn’t ready to fly to the moon. When I was the age he was when we were born, I didn’t have a pot to piss in, much less the emotional maturity to do anything for anyone but myself—or even for myself, for that matter.” He continues to say that he viscerally understood his father’s decision to not stick around for his family.

And yet, even with this understanding, he refuses to make the same choices. Instead, he works to break familial cycles. His narrative encourages men to find solace in shared spaces, to lean into relationships rather than atomizing pain in isolation. He writes about finding community in the early morning hours at a coffee shop, a place where he met men from all walks of life, all who dealt with private struggles and who were able to reach outside themselves and find healing and wholeness in the presence of others.

Part of the power in Choukalas’s account is his subject position as an anesthesiologist and intensive care physician. If depression were something that came for the weak, if it were something that one could just grit their teeth and power through, Choukalas would have been able to do it. He is a high-functioning, ultra-achiever. In revealing his struggle with mental health, he refuses to accept a cartesian dualism that the mind and body are separate, that psychological struggles are akin to moral failing.

In fact, Choukalas’s ability to achieve outside ambitions may have been the very spirit that put him at risk for a mental health condition in the postpartum period. Babies are unpredictable. He coped with their uncertainty with control, developing elaborate sleep schedules and meticulously charting bowel movements. He deprived their family of the pleasure of long hikes or weekends away in order to maintain order and predictability. This, he admits, was ultimately not for the sake of the children: he did this for his own sanity. It was the loud voices in his head he longed to quiet, not the infant cries of his flesh and blood.

Choukalas’s voice is straight-forward and no-nonsense. Far from self-pitying, there were times he seemed almost too hard on himself. He became a father of twins after years of infertility at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. At this same time, he was also serving as a physician on the front lines in the ICU. As he described his obsession with schedules and sleep, this didn’t seem solely pathological: our culture required obsessions and compulsions as part of safety protocol during the pandemic. I often found myself wondering if his path to fatherhood would have been easier if it hadn’t begun in the middle of a world health crisis. This is not to diminish his credibility; Choukalas’s ability to eschew victimhood certainly strengthens his narrative. But in reading his account, I found myself considering how our environments impact mental health—not just the conditions of our childhood or the chemistry of our brains, but the day in, day out world in which we live.

Choukalas likens his healing journey to kintsugi, “the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by joining the pieces together with golden lacquer, making a strong and beautiful product out of shards.” Near the end of the memoir, Choukalas is given a friend suggestion on Facebook: his father who had abandoned him as a child. As he evaluates the profile picture of his father, he sees that his father shares the same eyes that his daughter, Pia, possesses. Both figures broke him open, though one was the catalyst for stitching him back together, making him new. This memoir does the important work of shining light on a condition that is often shrouded with shame, of envisioning how men can heal, grow, and thrive in the postpartum period, too.