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Women share their experiences with birth control and depression

The research validates what many women have long understood about the pill.

By Maria Gallucci and Nicole Gallucci on October 6, 2016

Women share their experiences with birth control and depression

Credit: BSIP/getty images

Women around the world are sharing their emotional reactions on Twitter to a recent study that confirmed a link between birth control pills and depression.

The study, which is the largest of its kind, involved more than 1 million Danish women between the ages of 15 and 34.

Researchers found that girls and women taking birth control pills were 23 percent more likely to be prescribed an antidepressant or diagnosed with depression for the first time, compared with women who hadn't taken the medication, according to their study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

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Their findings inspired women who are currently on birth control, or have used it in the past, to share their own experiences on Twitter.

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Researchers from the University of Copenhagen had followed participants for 13 years to learn whether women who used hormonal contraceptives were more likely to face depression than women who did not use birth control.

They wrote in the study that despite the clinical evidence that hormonal contraception can influence some women's moods, the associations between taking birth control and mood disturbances "remain inadequately addressed."

The finding that women taking birth control pills were 23 percent more likely to deal with depression applied specifically to the combined oral contraceptive pill, which contains estrogen and progestin, a steroid hormone.

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The study found that adolescents are especially sensitive to the pill's effects. Fifteen-to-19-year-olds were 80 percent more likely to be on antidepressants than their peers who weren't on the pill.

"Adolescent girls are more vulnerable to risk factors for depression," Charlotte Wessel Skovlund, the study's lead author, and her colleagues, explained in the study.

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Other forms of birth control posed an even higher "relative risk" of depression than the pill.

Users of a vaginal ring, like NuvaRing, were 60 percent more likely to be prescribed antidepressants or be diagnosed with depression than women who didn't take any birth control, the study found.

Women who received the birth control shot -- known as a medroxyprogesterone acetate depot, which lasts for three months -- were 175 percent more likely to experience depression.

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Still, psychiatry experts have cautioned patients and doctors against jumping to conclusions about the study's results.

"The relative risk is indeed elevated in women who have used contraceptives, but the degree of elevation is not alarming," Dr. Maureen Van Niel, president of the American Psychiatry Association's Women's Caucus, told Psychiatric News.

By the personal accounts that flooded Twitter, most women are just happy the link between depression and the pill is finally being discussed.

Topics Mental Health

Maria Gallucci

Maria Gallucci was a Science Reporter at Mashable. She was previously the energy and environment reporter at International Business Times; features editor of Makeshift magazine; clean economy reporter for InsideClimate News; and a correspondent in Mexico City until 2011. Maria holds degrees in journalism and Spanish from Ohio University's Honors Tutorial College.