Menopause Treatment And Depression

Menopause treatment is not the same thing as depression treatment, despite the fact that depression can be one of the symptoms associated with menopause and peri-menopause. Many of the mood alterations that take place during this time are natural, normal results of fluctuations in hormones, which may be addressed with diet or hormone therapy rather than intense depression therapy. This means, of course, that drug products that would ordinarily be prescribed for depression might not deal with the real cause of the depression, whatever degree of relief they might bring.

Menopause treatment, when dealing with depression, always needs to take into account the fact that estrogen plays some role in mood enhancement, while progesterone has a more destabilizing effect. Current treatments for transitional menopause symptoms generally involve some sort of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Yet many doctors recognize that if a woman has had depressive episodes in the past, or has even had post partum depression treatment at some point, HRT can in fact worsen the risk of depression when entering the menopausal phase.

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 the co-author of Curing Your Anxiety And Panic Attacks which detailed treatment for anxiety attacks as well as tips on the various anxiety attack medications available at anxietydisordercure.com.