NY Mag: Listening to Estrogen

[GrinitchSpinach]

Hormones have always been a third rail in female mental health. They may also be a skeleton key.

www.thecut.com/2018/12/is-estrogen-the-key-to-understanding-womens-mental-health.html?_ga=2.97559391.1701449776.1546263561-1481412232.1519490593

I found this article fascinating. It touches on the ways that misogyny and paternalism in medicine have ignored possible causes and treatments for serious symptoms in women, especially peri- and menopausal women.

It also adds an entirely new layer of concern for me to the implications of giving young girls puberty blockers and testosterone...

I also found it fascinating. We need to tell our stories, women's stories, create a whole complex pattern of who we are and why we are. Should be easy enough in this computer age. Apart from our women's voices are being silenced.

That was so interesting! Thanks for posting

It's ridiculous how little knowledge or help there is.,

For example, women who breastfeed longer term can find themselves going through a slow hormonal shift as feeds reduce which sometimes can affect mood. And may experience a significant shift when they finish. There's a) little info on this and b) little info on what might help.

I also think that I needed some sort of hormone balance when periods returned and I was still feeding.

The best gynaecologist in the country on the subject of female hormones and mental health. (Treated a family member, probably saved her life.)
www.studd.co.uk/pmsbipolar.php

borntobequiet, great link! From it:

There is a problem that psychiatrists frequently misdiagnose severe premenstrual syndrome as bipolar disorder...A great effort needs to be made to encourage psychiatrists to treat postnatal depression, premenstrual depression and climacteric depression with transdermal oestrogens rather than antidepressants and to become aware of the means of distinguishing the cyclical depression of PMS from bipolar depression by information in the patient’s history.

I'm glad the professor was able to help your family member.

The truth is, for all the codifications of the DSM, science still has an extremely rudimentary and tentative understanding of what actually happens in the brains of people we recognize as mentally ill. And political institutions routinely fail to meaningfully fund that inquiry. The estrogen hypothesis is valuable not because it provides a clear-cut answer as to why some women mentally deteriorate in midlife but because it suggests one way, in the face of a terrifying mystery, to begin exploring it

Extremely interesting. Thanks for sharing GrinitchSpinach

Studd has been linked on mn before, iirc in the menopause topic - I'm quite shocked that his approach isn't more commonly used?