Birth Control and PMDD

Here's a link to another excellent article by Holly Grigg-Spall, about how your oral contraceptive may be affecting your relationships.  Just remember that in taking birth control for your PMDD, you are messing with your hormones, and your hormones are already messed up, so...

You do the math.

Oral contraceptives only mask the problem.  They do not cure it, or make it go away.  In the end, more often than not, they make the problem worse.  Because eventually you will go off of the Pill, and if it doesn't happen sooner, that's most likely when your hormonal issues will resurface and with a vengeance.

Here's a quote from Holly's article:  Professor Jayashri Kulkarni, the director of Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia, found women on the pill are twice as likely to be depressed, anxious, have poor self-esteem, feel irritable, hostile, and numb to experiences.

Sound like anyone you know?

“We’ve seen the destruction of relationships, due to women becoming irritable, hostile and prickly when taking the pill. And then they look back and say ‘that wasn’t me’. There can be the breakdown of marriages,” Prof. Kulkarni describes.

You don't deal with a problem by covering it up.  If you are having any of these mood or emotional issues and are on the Pill, don't be so quick to blame yourself alone for feeling any of the above.  Your moods could be getting a boost--and not in the right direction--from your birth control pills.