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A study analyzing data on over 1 million women has found an association between hormonal birth control and use/prescription of antidepressants:
"Today in vindication," wrote a woman on Twitter on Tuesday, summarizing the way many have received a striking new study [DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.2387] [DX] that found those who use birth control — especially teenage girls — may be at a significantly higher risk of experiencing depression. The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, has been heralded as groundbreaking for its depth and breadth, even if it seems to only confirm what some women say they've been feeling for years — that their hormonal contraceptives make them sad.
Women who used the combined birth control pill, a mix of estrogen and progestin, were 23 percent more likely to be prescribed anti-depressants than nonusers, and progestin-only pills raised the likelihood by 34 percent. With the patch, antidepressant use doubled; risk increased by 60 percent for vaginal rings and 40 percent for hormonal IUDs. And for teens age 15 to 19 taking combined oral contraceptives, the use of anti-depressants spiked 80 percent. Although those percentages may seem shocking, the absolute change is a small but significant spike. Among women who did not use hormonal birth control, an average of 1.7 out of 100 began taking anti-depressants in a given year. That rate increased to 2.2 out of 100 if the women took birth control.
It's the first study to conclude there might be a link between birth control and depression, author Øjvind Lidegaard told The Washington Post. Mood swings are often listed as a known side effect, but not clinical depression.
Also at The Guardian and CBC.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @08:38AM
Or is it just me?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 06 2016, @10:41AM
Not as depressing as having to write out a check for child support.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday October 06 2016, @04:55PM
You may want to see a doctor, or consult the magic banana for proper use.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @08:59AM
There isn't an objective test for things like "depression" so psychiatrists get together and identify clusters of symptoms that they collect into a manual called the DSM. When a new one is about to be published they get multiple doctors to evaluate the same patient and see how much they agree on the diagnosis, this is called "inter-rater agreement" and the measure is called "kappa." The IRA for Major Depressive Disorder in the latest DSM is depressingly low, with a kappa of 0.28.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @09:07AM
p.s. a kappa of 0.28 means expert psychiatrists under controlled conditions only agree that patients have major depressive disorder between 4% and 15% of the time*
* http://bjpo.rcpsych.org/content/1/2/e5 [rcpsych.org]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @09:00AM
Well, this explains Francis.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday October 07 2016, @02:25AM
The pope or the talking mule?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @09:04AM
Happy homosexual women don't need antidepressants, birth control, or men.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 06 2016, @11:11AM
Lesbians aren't happy. ~35% of them are physically abused by their partner1. Now my leet 2-1 skillz tell me this also means a similar percentage must be physically abusive, so it looks like almost 3/4 of lesbians are either abusive cunts or getting the shit kicked out of them. Or both. I suppose there's probably some overlap or repeat offenders. So, maybe only 2/3 or even only 1/2 of them are not queefing rainbows. That still makes them a pretty fucking unhappy demographic.
1 http://www.advocate.com/crime/2014/09/04/2-studies-prove-domestic-violence-lgbt-issue [advocate.com]
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @12:45PM
> Now my leet 2-1 skillz tell me this also means a similar percentage must be physically abusive,
From the source you provided:
The National Violence Against Women survey found that 21.5 percent of men and 35.4 percent of women living with a same-sex partner experienced intimate-partner physical violence in their lifetimes,
So no, it does not mean that at all. But thanks for demonstrating that not only are you socially inept, you are also innumerate.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:35PM
NCADV [ncadv.org] to the rescue! See here, pp. 2 [cdc.gov]:
More than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
Also see pp. 38, tables 4.1 and 4.2 if you want to drill down and just look at physical violence (also has lifetime vs. 12 month figures but does not include sexual orientation) which gives 32.9% for women and 28.2% for men in a lifetime.
Huh. So, let's look at Buzzard's link, which cites a newer version of the study I linked:
The CDC’s 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, released again in 2013 with new analysis, reports in its first-ever study focusing on victimization by sexual orientation that the lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner was 43.8 percent for lesbians, 61.1 percent for bisexual women, and 35 percent for heterosexual women, while it was 26 percent for gay men, 37.3 percent for bisexual men, and 29 percent for heterosexual men (this study did not include gender identity or expression).
Ranking: Bi women > lesbians > bi men > hetero women > hetero men > gay men.
Also right before that, where Buzzard got his number:
The National Violence Against Women survey found that 21.5 percent of men and 35.4 percent of women living with a same-sex partner experienced intimate-partner physical violence in their lifetimes, compared with 7.1 percent and 20.4 percent for men and women, respectively, with a history of only opposite-sex cohabitation.
So we've got two different studies going on here with some different numbers they're throwing our way. I'm also concerned about bisexual erasure in the NVAW study. According to The Advocate's wording, they may have lumped all women currently living with a same-sex partner in the “lesbian” box whether that was appropriate or not. However, comparing the 2010 CDC numbers to the 2013 numbers cited by The Advocate, the trend seems to be consistent (lifetime rape, physical violence, and stalking 35.6% all women in 2010 vs. 43.8% lesbians only in 2013).
My take on it: what this means is! Radfems and Dianists need to take the plank out of their own eye before they attempt to remove the splinter from the rest of “all men” (including trans women, because that's how they roll)'s eye.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:16PM
Let's bold all those who partner with women:
There's a strong bias to the violent side here.
Let's bold all those who are women:
There's a bias to the violent side here, too.
Also this partitioning reveals: For each sex individually, the lowest risk is in partnering with men, partnering with women gives a higher risk, and partnering with both gives the highest risk. However for each selection of partner individually, women are more at risk than men.
Note, however that there is not a clear trend homo vs. hetero; the only orientation that matters seems to be bi. Otherwise, the general rule seems to be: The more women in the relationship, the more violence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @08:47PM
But where does these studies get there numbers? Whether participant reported or police data or almost anywhere it seems like there's going to be strong self selecting biases. I believe, but don't have numbers to back it up, that men are going to be far less likely to report being victims of violence. So don't read too much into AC's above.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fraxinus-tree on Thursday October 06 2016, @10:29AM
Isn't it backwards? Women with depression symptoms could be more likely to use hormonal birth control.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @10:47AM
Isn't hormonal birth control generally used while in relationships? Perhaps the women are just discovering what it's like to be in a relationship with a man.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday October 06 2016, @11:18AM
It could be worse. They could be in a relationship with a woman [soylentnews.org].
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday October 06 2016, @11:23AM
IANAStatistician, but I'm wondering why this even matters, They're overblowing a 1/200 (0.5/100) increase in the incidence of “depression,” whatever the hell that is. OMG 80%!eleven!1!
…The study, which analyzed the medical records of one million Danish women ages 15 to 34, revealed a correlation between depression and birth control, but it didn’t directly explore — or prove — that it was the birth control that explicitly caused that depression…. Other scientific experts proposed counter theories for what might have caused the depression instead — among them, being lovesick and heartbroken.
“With having a million women, there are 101 things that are variable here,” Diana Mansour, vice president for clinical quality at the Faculty for Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare in London, told Metro UK. “There’s other things going on in their life like relationships, relationships breaking down and especially with adolescents — just being in a sexual relationship.”
Catherine Monk, an associate professor in psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University Medical Center, offered a similar counter-theory.
“The possibility that this link between love, sex (contraception), and feeling depressed is strengthened by the fact that the contraception-depression link was strongest in adolescents, those who are at the developmental stage where trying to find a romantic partner is paramount,” Monk told the Huffington Post.
(Emphasis of course mine.)
I might listen if they can control a few variables. Now, before somebody goes, but Tsubasa, isn't the control group also experiencing those life events?! Isn't that why the study authors in part of that excerpt above you skipped over said that it was the only logical explanation?! Plus, they're fucking with the holy womyn-born-womyn body chemistry so something has to go wrong (#include AC's radfem comment up there)! Well, hold on. Here's the data point I want because I can only speculate. How does being on the pill affect sexual promiscuity? Are women on the pill more likely to pursue sexual relationships than women using GAWduh, abstinance, and the One Ring?
But I'm sure the alt-right will eat this up. I can already see the hysteria. “Abstinence is the way to happiness! Science proves it! And the world is flat, because I only listen to science when it's convenient! Trump 2016!”
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:43PM
Why are junk studies like this being posted to soylent? It isnt even interesting to point out the problems when it is this bad. These people are just wasting everyones time...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @05:31PM
It probably has something to do with there being less than 3 stories in the Pending Stories queue for most of yesterday. Phoenix666 and takyon are the main reason why the list didn't run dry, but they can only do so much.
Please try to help when you can and we'll have a better choice of submissions.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:29PM
Another question is what the numbers are when breaking up the numbers between women with and without children. Maybe women without children are more often depressive than women with children, and the observed correlation is just caused by the correlation between birth control and not having children.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @03:00PM
Taking drugs to avoid pregnancy makes you depressed?
And no one is surprised. Because PIV is rape [wordpress.com].
And so, if you're being raped often enough that you take drugs to avoid pregnancy, you're going to be depressed.
The only real solution is to eat at the Y!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @04:24PM
*facepalm*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @09:07PM
*facepalm*
You can scoff all you want, but the day is coming when you and that thing between your legs will be obsolete.
Thank goodness for science. Pretty soon, we'll just create our own XX embryos and won't have to worry about getting raped any more. [wordpress.com].
Your days are numbered, asshole!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday October 07 2016, @02:42AM
*facepalm again!*
If my wife thought I was raping her in any way, she'd let me know ,Bobbit style. When we were younger, she'd often be the one on top and in control,: she could have climbed off and walked away. Instead, she got her pleasure as I got mine: again, she could have done it manually... instead, she went with the "rape" option and rode me as she liked.
Not all men are asses, just as not all women are...... well.... INSANE?!?!?
Get off it. Or get on it. Whatever.
I'm guessing you had a man severely hurt you. "Men" don't do those things. Only small boys/assholes. Don't confuse them with men.
And don't confuse your above response with"woman". That was not an adult response.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @08:07AM
PIV (Penis In Vagina) intercourse is rape. Always. [wordpress.com]
One of my fellow travelers explained this quite clearly. I link to it above, but I'll excerpt it here for you because you clearly don't get it. By engaging in PIV, you are traumatizing your abused slave ^W^W wife [wordpress.com] and she is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and PTSD. This is reinforced every time you rape [wordpress.com] her.
. Here's what you should (but refuse to accept!) understand::
Not only do you and your evil kind routinely torture and abuse us, it's so ingrained in this patriarchal society that you think you're actually a pretty decent person. Well I'm here to tell you that you're not. You're a torturer, and along with the rest of you animals, you're destroying the planet while you torture and rape us to force our capitulation to the hellish world you've created.
No more, I say. No more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @10:52PM
This is extremely easy to test for: Was the depression present before taking the birth control or only afterwards?
And it doesn't pass the common sense test: Why would depressed women want to take birth control? Is it feasible that disrupting your hormones may induce depression? The hormone disruption is far more likely to be the cause. Though not everything follows common sense: Maybe depression causes serve period pain and greatly increases fertility (both are false), but there is a tiny chance of something like that being the reason so the next study should check for this.
(Score: 5, Informative) by esperto123 on Thursday October 06 2016, @11:35AM
From what I can tell, this may only show that women that seek medical help from a gynecologist are more likely to seek help from a psychiatrist.
To actually show a link between hormonal contraceptives and depression it should be done a double blind and observe the ones on placebo having less depression or the one on contraceptives increasing the depression.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:57PM
I personally would be thrilled in the most sarcastic sense to discover that my wife's birth control was switched to a placebo.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @03:40PM
In a double-blind study, neither your wife nor the experimenter would know it had been switched (nor would you).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 06 2016, @05:10PM
When birth control pills get switched to a placebo, you would know. A few weeks/months later, that is.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday October 07 2016, @12:00AM
YES!
Thank you for a not-stupid post. I love not-stupid posts.
To be fair it starts off at the beginning with appropriate reserve ("has found an association") but it certainly still comes off as endorsing the idea not just of an association but a 'link' with context clearly implying that the word is being used in a way that implies 'causal.'
Now your objection is one of the more obvious ones to make here, and imposing in it's undeniability, but it's obviously quite difficult, roughly impossible, to run properly controlled experiments on humans without colliding with generally accepted ethics policies. This is a problem for many fields, not just this one, and for as long as people have attempted to do science, not just recently. As a result, there is a commonly accepted work-around.
Didn't read this study to see if they did it or just guesstimated it and said it looks good (the latter is sadly common lately) but if they did it right (more on that in a minute) it would work something like this. They would not only plot the results according to the two main groupings, those on birth control and those not on birth control, but they would further break it down by all kinds of other variables, generally demographic - e.g. income range, education level, 'race' etc. They would then *adjust* the initial results based on that data. The idea being that at this stage you can detect and cancel signals caused by these other variables, leaving only the signal you are looking for.
Ok now the later part. Frankly I've always been skeptical of this. Yes you can control for certain well-understood biases this way, but it's dangerous to assume because a variable has been named and numbered it is actually understood. And of course the variables that are NOT named and numbered are clearly not being corrected for.
So there's a correlation. I'm pretty sure btw this was neither the first study to find the correlation nor the first to suggest there might be a causal relationship. I've read research on this before I feel certain.
Anyhow, there's correlation. But what does it mean? It could mean these methods of birth control cause depression, which is what the write-up is CLEARLY designed to imply.
It could also mean that depressed women are more likely to choose to take these methods of birth control.
Or, there might be no link between the two directly at all. There might be a third factor of some kind which causes women to be both more likely to take these method of birth control, and independently also more likely to be diagnosed with depression.
Oh, did you see what I did there? To be *diagnosed* with depression.
It's not like these people doing this 'study' actually went out and evaluated the girls using some objective gold standard and definitively determined each of the girls they have as a '1' in the depression field are actually clinically depressed. They didn't do that because that would be way too time consuming and expensive, perhaps, but even were that not a problem it's simply impossible to do. There is no gold standard test for clinical depression. One way to gain a little empathy, a little insight, into what clinical depression feels like is simply to contemplate how absurdly low the rate of agreement is when psychiatrists are double-blind tested on this diagnosis. But they're checking none of this, they're simply surveying who has the scrips and assuming they're all completely objective and dispositive.
And I suspect they know that, they probably even mentioned it, they probably think they gave themselve a big enough fudge factor to cover it. But the other side of the same assumption is less likely to have been apprehended. They are also, implicitly even if not consciously, assuming that the *lack of* a scrip for an anti-depressive drug indicates a lack of depression. To state such an assumption is to dispel it.
So I'll even go out on a limb here and offer a full alternative hypothesis. I suppose that women who take hormonal birth control are also women who are more likely than average to make a habit of going to the doctors - in many cases you have to go see a doctor to get them. And this would also neatly explain why they are more likely to have been diagnosed with clinical depression - because, similarly, you MUST go to a doctor to get this.
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Thursday October 06 2016, @12:21PM
Easy AND desperate!
compiling...
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:43PM
1. hormones can mess with weight retention
2. hormones can mess with mood.
To profit, it must be billable.
QED. hormone birthcontrol causes depression.
/critical_scientific_reviewer
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Thursday October 06 2016, @03:15PM
Also causes depression, and weight gain.
(Score: 2) by Username on Thursday October 06 2016, @09:08PM
It’s well know that women who have children are happier than those who don’t. All females of every species are programmed to reproduce. It makes sense there would be some psychological negatives when you choose not to reproduce.
I’ll even go a step further, and point out married women with children are happier than single mothers. Primarily because they have a stable life with all their needs met.
Another step, married women with children who associate with other married women with children instead of single mothers are also happier. No debbie downer.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday October 07 2016, @04:06AM
that's a common misconception.
In my recent depression, I've been sleeping excessively but have not felt sad.
In the very worst of depression, one feels nothing at all.
While sadness often does occur in depression, there are other symptoms.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]