There's important food for thought to be found in this story out of Pennsylvania today.

In November 2003, Vicki Hummel came home from Russia with her newly adopted baby boy, excited to start a joyful new phase of her life.

Instead, the first-time mother plunged into despair. Even picking up her son, Alex, took enormous effort. She was convinced she could die at any moment.

Today, feeling better, Hummel has hard-won perspective on the little recognized and rarely studied malady that leveled her post-adoption depression.

Siting an Internet poll done by the Eastern European Adoption Coalition (WWAC) that says 65% of parents who've adopted from Russian, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine suffered from some degree of depression after bringing their children home, the article explains that the American Psychiatric Association does not recognize post-adoption depression as an illness.

Author Melissa Fay Green would disagree, as her experience after adopting her son, Jesse, from Bulgaria in 1999 proved to be exactly that. (She shares her experiences, and those of others, in her book, "A Love Like No Other: Stories From Adoptive Parents")

Fortunately, the increase in sheer numbers of international adoptions is beginning to shine a light on the problems and alert parents to the potential of depression setting in after an adoption is complete.

In particular danger, advocates say, are parents who adopt older children - age 2 and up - from overseas orphanages. Since 1990, the number of foreign-born children adopted into U.S. homes has tripled, to 22,728 last year. Those expecting love at first sight can be shaken by kids who arrive frightened, lost and unable to understand a word of English.

In the orphanage, some children may have soothed themselves by banging their heads against walls. Some bite, hit and steal, behavior born of self-preservation. Some may be slow to attach, not wanting to be held or touched.

"Feeling anxious or upset, or even angry that things aren't the way you'd dreamed they would be, can lead to terrible guilt," says Mindy Coath, past president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Families With Children From China. "But you don't talk to anyone about it ... because you've got everyone around you reminding you how much you wanted this."

It should go without saying ... but it won't here ... that many families adopting older children internationally make the transition smoothly and suffer no depression at all, but forewarned is forearmed and preparation is a necessary component of any adoption.