Many people confuse depression treatment with menopause treatment, but they are not the same things, even if they address some similar symptoms. The mood alterations during menopause and peri-menopause stem normally from fluctuations in hormones, and rather than requiring depression therapy, these can often be alleviated with diet or hormone therapy. This means that drug products that might normally be prescribed for depression might bypass the root cause of the problem even while bringing some measure of relief.
According to some studies, estrogen in general is something of a mood enhancer, or at least it works with other factors to help elevate one’s outlook. Progesterone, on the other hand, destabilizes the mood. Menopause treatment has to take these facts into account, when depression is one of the symptoms. Current treatments for general peri-menopausal symptoms usually involve hormone replacement therapy (HRT), yet choosing this type of therapy can actually create an even greater risk of depression for women who have previously had post partum depression treatment or have a history of other depressive episodes.
That would mean that such women might consider seeking alternative treatments to alleviate menopausal symptoms, to try to avoid increasing their depression risk even further. And while there are vitamins and supplements that can help, sometimes the best treatments will simply be to exercise and eat properly. Making sure they eat a diet containing plenty of natural estrogens may improve a woman’s mood just as well as drugs, in many cases. A few examples of these foods would be lentils, beans, apples, broccoli, beets, tomatoes, squash and olives. And there are many more. All of this is part of the natural treatment of menopause in general, but depressive symptoms that go along with menopause are as likely to be relieved as other symptoms.
There are other symptoms of menopause, and sometimes women genuinely do need the broad forms of menopause treatment, including HRT, even if these treatments also increase the risk of depression. When that is the case, doctors agree that normal depression therapy should accompany the hormone treatments, and should include antidepressant medications. Rather than making women suffer through untreated depression, all possible health treatments should be made available to them.
Beth Kaminski is a leading expert in how to treating anxiety disorder and has been publishing lots of information on the best anxiety disorder medication for years now at anxietydisordercure.com.
Diseases, Conditions and Treatments • September 30th, 2009 •