A recent study on the effects of hormonal birth control on rates of depression in young women has scientists and journalists alike scratching their heads.
The study, published by the JAMA Psychiatry journal in Denmark, collected data on hormonal birth control users for 14 years. It found a very slight increase in the probability that a woman would be diagnosed with depression or prescribed antidepressants after starting the birth control.
Like, very slight.
NPR reports on the data that “about 0.5 percent of who began hormonal contraception developed depression who might not have otherwise.”
Basically, it claims that birth control could cause depression, but also, it could be unrelated.
Yet the study spooks us. We don’t know enough about hormonal birth control. It moves in mysterious ways and affects each woman differently, and we don’t know why.
The Denmark study and the resulting confusion only really supply one answer: birth control research should be more prevalent and taken more seriously.
Using the wrong pill prescription or intrauterine device for your body can have very painful and uncomfortable side effects. Some women gain 30 pounds and experience back aches. Others reject their IUDs and experience contractions. It has become a guess-and-check system to figure out which method is right for you.
Longer, more in-depth hormonal studies could remedy that issue.
Contraceptives have not been given the attention they deserve in the research world because they are considered taboo. There is enough religious opposition to certain forms of birth control that some companies — cough, cough, Hobby Lobby — go out of their way not to supply health insurance coverage for them.
When will we get over the female reproductive system being “gross”?
That mentality is what keeps us from making progress in the policy that — for some reason — surrounds the uterus, and it’s keeping us from making progress in understanding it as well.
Studies like the one in Denmark can and have sparked conversations about the safety of hormonal contraceptives — sometimes negative conversations. Because we know so little about how and why they affect women the way they do, a headline that says “The Pill increases your chances of depression” seems very believable and can deter women from using hormonal contraceptives altogether.
That is certainly not good for any woman who isn’t looking to become pregnant, because, as we all have committed to memory from middle school health class, condoms are only 97 percent effective.
As Jeffery Jensen, director of the Women’s Health Research Unit at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, put it in an interview with NPR, “If you really want to be depressed, have an unintended pregnancy.”
By investing more time in researching birth control and normalizing conversations about women’s sexual health in general, we can decrease the stigma and skepticism surrounding birth control methods.
meickhof@indiana.edu
@maggie_eickhoff
