Is there a disregard for the effects of contraception on women's mental health?

"It is a good point that if a treatment for men affected their sex drive / performance then it would be a side effect raised carefully with patients and I suspect not considered acceptable in something that was not for quite serious conditions."

To be fair it's not. antidepressants can significantly affect us in that area and it gets no mention by the doctors, but it's on the leaflets.

Oh.

In the last couple of years I feel like everything is smelly (especially me!).

I put it down to changes due to childbirth - I think your sense of smell gets more acute when you are pg and I thought maybe it had sort of carried on.

Reading that though I realise I was on the pill for about 15 years up to when I wanted to get pg, then mirena which disagreed with me after the babies, and this new aromatic lifestyle probably ties in with us using condoms.

I always wondered why I didn't think cigarettes smelt too bed / couldn't smell them on me or other people, when many others thought they stank

The problem with all of this stuff is - it' subtle - long term - slow changes. Not as cut and dried as "I did this and this happened". eg with the Mirena I thought it was OK but had a couple of concerns, it wasn't til it came out that loads of stuff suddenly wasn't bothering me any more. Like constant low-grade thrush.

Also the point about scenting out mates - I saw that program too - if the pill does alter how women scent mates then that is a huge problem as there is a reason that we sniff each other out.

I also had zero libido and altered sense of smell.

I've been discussing this with my friends for decades and we believed it to be a great conspiracy / cover up!!

I'm now 40 and have refused the pill since my late 20s after being plunged into horrendous depression about 4 times on different brands. The pattern is that I actually feel fantastic for 3 months and then a debilitating panicky paranoid depression follows and only lifts when I stopped taking it. It lifts almost imediately. I've told various GPs, including women, who have dismissed my depression as co-incidence and unproven. I am convinced though and I will never risk the mirena coil though I've heard some women consider it a wonder drug.

I've read on MN that in other European countries blood tests are done to hormonally match you to your contraceptive which I think shows not everyone should be given it?

Dark dark days on the pill. I wasn't great ante nataliy either.

I also read (and have experience myself) that the pill changes your sense of smell. It can affect the type of man you are attracted to and how you react. It really can have an effect on women's lives. For the first few weeks after coming off the pill I couldn't believe how strong everything smelt. I kept on asking DH what the smells were and if it was normal! He thought I was mad!

Mumsnet campaign?

www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/nyregion/01seaman.html

I'm sorry this is a repeat of my posts above but I think it's important. My Mum always said that the pill was rushed onto the market with little testing. It's a touchy issue for feminists because the pill was such an important area for the women's movement in the 60s and 70s and so important for increasing men's ability to get consequence-free sex .

However Barbara Seaman was talking about the pill's effect on mental health in 1969 according to this obituary:

www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/nyregion/01seaman.html

She raised suicidal depression as a side-effect as well as the other, more familiar ones such as heart attack and thrombosis.

She was apparently blacklisted as a writer and pharma companies would pull their advertising from publications which printed her articles (according to wiki).

From my experience I would not use hormonal contraceptives or HRT. The possibility of depression has never been mentioned to me by any doctor but it's clearly a real possibility. I'm very disappointed, disturbed even, that a feminist blog would say you are scaremongering. Even though this is a difficult subject for feminists, we can't turn away from it.

A friend of mine who wants to start a family but suffers from extreme anxiety and panic attacks around the issue of childbirth, was similarly fobbed off by doctors and told to go home and talk to her husband and family. Obviously she'd done that, she wanted professional advice about whether she would be able to have an elective C Section, what the options were etc - you know: practical, knowledgeable advice. Not to be told she was a silly girl who needs to talk to her mum.

Agree with this Lurcio's point that it also happens when taking children to the doctor. I found we were only taken seriously when DH took them. It's as though it must be serious if a man is worried, rather than just an 'over anxious mother'. I received similar paternalistic treatment with childbirth choices.

O.P - as another idea, maybe you can offer it as a guest post on one of the MN feminist blogs.

I took Dianette for several years in my teens/early twenties and used to have really black moods during it. It wasn't until some time after I stopped taking it that I realised the impact it must have had on me.

I feel this is a hugely underreported and underdiscussed issue. Thanks for raising it.

I think you could rework your article about the problem with treating women as adults around all sorts of health issues (coming off Lurcio's point: "The only other time I've found this level of disregard by HCP for my ability to form rational judgements about my own experience was as a new mother") and focus on this too.

I don't think I've ever gone for a contraception appointment and come out feeling anything other than humiliated/ patronised. I imagine men only get asked about their sex lives and general habits in that level of detail when they get a rash and have to go to the clinic.

Thanks for adding the side effects to the thread, Makes the response from the other website even more bizarre. You'd think they'd check - or as women just know! - that those warnings were there!

I put my experience with the Mirena upthread - it was not good. Loads of threads on here about Mirena and terrible side effects which get dismissed by HCPs.

Is there are general feeling in society that women make things up for no apparent reason? Just thinking that the lack of belief that women with nasty side effects of hormonal contraception are met with is similar to the lack of belief when they come forward with other negative stories.

Just checked microgynon. "Depressive moods or mood swings" experienced by between 100 and 1000 in 10000. This is described as "common". It's also not something the doctor mentioned when he prescribed it, even though I have a history of depression. Thanks for resurrecting the thread, it's made me think about switching to something non hormonal.

I don't take it anymore but I have an old packet of Mercilion in the cupboard (a combined pill) and just had a look at the patient info and it has depression or mood changes as a side effect. So depression on it's own, not just general mood changes. The other side effects are scary too (including Chorea, a condition of the nervous system causing involuntary jerky movements?! No one ever mentioned that one!). So yes it says in the blurb it can cause depression and it should be taken seriously.

Fascinating thread, prompted me to report an appalling side effect i've just had from taking Norethisterone.

I was taking it to avoid having a period while on holiday. My contraception for the past 8ish years has been the copper coil because of hormone probs.

This time i have been in completely unreasonable rages, been horribly weepy, and have wanted to self harm to release the stress (I didn't). Thankfully after coming off it the side effects are going, but i have had it before without this happening.

I really had to battle to get the copper coil though, the hard sell with Mirena was awful!

Thanks for all of the replies, everybody. It's good to know that somebody agrees with me that this is a serious issue which needs to be talked about.

Vagenda is essentially a 'humorous' feminist blog, so I can absolutely see their point that this is a bit too serious for them. But I was surprised that they called it 'scaremongering', because that absolutely wasn't how I intended it to come across. And mental health problems are scary, there's no avoiding that really, is there?

I do have a blog, but it's embarrassingly crafty/baking/DIY orientated. I'm thinking of writing a feministy one too, so we'll see how that goes.

I might spend some time having another edit of my piece, but in the mean time, how could we even begin to tackle this idea that women's MH issues can be easily dismissed because of, as LRD put it, the lady-hormones-sloshing-around thing?

I totally agree with that, scallops.

I think a lot of it is this 'but you have hormones sloshing about all the time! They make you mad and strange!' attitude. As if men don't have hormones, or as if somehow no-one need care about synthetic hormones because the real ones can be problematic too.

Take it a step back and you get to the Victorian attitudes about the 'curse of Eve' and how women really deserve to suffer because their bodies are fundamentally that way.

And I think one of the reasons that this link isn't taken seriously or is dismissed, is because of misogyny. Women are thought to be a little bit 'hormonal' or 'loopy' or hypochondriacs anyway so what's a bit more of that in the mix And of course as others have said women's health isn't treated as seriously as men's.

That's really odd of them. There are definitely known links. They do seem to go both ways, though - some people find their mood swings/depression gets better on some kinds of pill (I did, though - boo - I'm not allowed to take that one any more).

I hope you get somewhere with your article, because I do think it's something that isn't well understood/discussed enough.

Interesting thread. Personally, I haven't had any problems with hormonal contraceptive and mental health (although I was constantly nauseous on the pill which affected it!). However a good friend of mine was incredibly depressed after going on the depo. It was very frightening to watch. Thankfully she made the connection quite quickly but as Branleuse said it can take a few months to work its way out of your system.

I agree with Mnachesterhistorygirl. If you have a blog chaoshayley we can get it out there through twitter/Facebook.

The pill side effects I have looked at (just a couple and not full as on things like patient.co.uk and NHS all talk about "mood changes" or similar.

Would be interesting if anyone is on the pill on the thread to see what it says in the blurb in the packet.

There ^is" a proven link so why have these people said there's not? I don't get it.

Auntfini that's terrible. Why won't they take it seriously I wonder.

When I started Uni I went on the pill, totally withdrew from social activities, felt like I was in a haze, like a great fog was around me. Cried a lot. Missed loads of lectures. Got into a few thousands of debt as couldn't stop spending (nothing to show for it). This carried on for about a year until one day I made the link in my head that I had felt fine before the pill, came off and within a week felt miles better.
When I discussed it with the nurse she chuckled about it. I felt like I was making a fuss out of nothing but actually that contraception ruined a year of my life.

Chaos do you have your own blog. If you do and a twitter account we cold all link to it and get it out there.

Seriously I am really surprised that they said "there is no proven link" when the drugs themselves declare it. And we know drug companies don't put down side effects unless they absolutely have to.

Who are Vagenda? They seem to have dismissed you out of hand for pretty spurious reasons if you ask me.