Antidepressants or HRT?

[jennyyellowhat]

I have an appointment with my doctor next week as the last 2 weeks have been awful and I have to change otherwise I'm going to do something terrible. This happens every few months. I've always had low level depression with short periods of deeper depression, and took antidepressants infrequently between the age of 20 - 35. I'm 45 now and haven't taken them for the last 10 years. In the meantime I'm diagnosed with ADHD and ASD, and my diagnosing psychiatrist popped PMDD and GAD to my post-nominals too.

But what I want to ask is - should I be thinking about HRT rather than antidepressants at this point in my life? My periods have been changing - for the last few years I've been experiencing pain during ovulation and they've gone from very light to heavy and now getting lighter again. They were regular until last month when my period was 2 weeks after the previous one (so when I would normally be ovulating) and the period itself was different, darker, with more stuff in it, but not particularly heavy. And then two weeks later (when I would normally have my period) I had a tiny bit of spotting.

I feel like my emotional wellbeing is so mixed up with life stuff - the adhd, bereavements, depression etc - that it's hard to know if what I feel is caused by those external problems or if it's hormonal, or a mixture of both. My experience with doctors taking me seriously isn't great (not always their fault, I often dismiss or play down my own feelings), so I really would like to go in well armed this time, can anyone advise?

I take both.

And they’ll prise both from my cold dead hands.

Once the HRT kicked in I got this entirely optimistic idea that I probably didn’t need the anti-Ds now my hormones were sorted. So I started to wean my self off them. Slowly, just half a tablet less per day for a couple of weeks then another half less.

That was not a good idea.

I was diagnosed with ADHD after a bereavement 7 years ago, when in retrospect I was clearly struggling mental health wise thanks to peri-meno kicking off. I think as I started to feel so much better on HRT I kind of convinced myself that ALL the contents of my head, including the ADHD, could have been a misdiagnosis and it was all peri.

But no. While I feel better than I have for a very long time, I’m just somebody with ADHD and depressive tendencies who got so much worse when peri joined the party. And I need All The Things (anti Ds, HRT, anti ADHD strategies) to stay well.

So maybe it’s not an either/or. Possibly you’d benefit from both.

I’m 53 and on sertraline which works great for me.

I took Anti Depressants for a while after my 2nd son was born - the Dr said I was depressed ... I think I was just knackered and crying a lot because of that! Getting off them was a pain and made me feel so ill. I wouldn't ever recommend them to anyone else - and as the evidence is now that there's no correlation between depression and serotonin levels, they can't fix your depression, but they do make you a bit more chilled while you're on them. I also took HRT for a few months but didn't really see enough change to continue with the risks they come with. My advice would be to get some mental health support rather than the drugs.