Mental Health

Menopause can be a difficult time. Intrusive symptoms like hot flashes, night sweats, painful sex, and sleep problems can create physical discomfort and emotional distress. Meanwhile, the transition out of your fertile years can be a time of introspection and give rise to complex feelings about your sense of self and your place in the world. For some, it is also a time when the symptoms of depression emerge, either for the first time or more severely than in the past.

When you struggle to fall asleep at night due to racing thoughts, you might brush it off as just another side effect of stress. When you wake up every morning feeling dread for the day to come, you might think it’s just because of your tight work schedule. But when you start feeling anxious for no reason at all, you might start to worry that something’s wrong. As those worries compound exponentially alongside uncomfortable physical and emotional symptoms of hormonal change, you finally realize that you need outside help to escape this painful cycle.

Mood swings are some of the least-understood aspects of menopause—and the most misrepresented. While pop culture representations of menopause tend to center specifically on mood, they typically treat menopausal women as a caricature of irrationality and hysteria rather than capturing the variability and complexity of menopause-related mood disturbances. Not only does this trivialize the very real suffering many women experience during this pivotal phase of life, but it may also leave you feeling ashamed and immobilized.

Most people know that testosterone is a critical part of physical wellbeing. However, a growing body of research suggests that this multifaceted hormone can also play a role in mental health in men. For example, a 2016 study on older men found that “low serum testosterone was associated with an 86% increased hazard of depression.”

Anxiety is considered a normal reaction to the causes of stress, such as the demands of work or home life, juggling expenses, driving in traffic, or being confronted by an unexpected change to your day-to-day routine. Anxiety is characterized by an apprehensive mood accompanied by increased arousal and vigilance. This heightened state is stimulated by cortisol, the stress hormone.

Depressive disorder is frequently referred to simply as depression—but let’s not just assume it’s only about feeling down or going through a passing phase. Depression is a serious mental health condition that requires patience from loved ones and professional medical and mental health care.

Following depression and alcoholism, social anxiety disorder is the third most common mental disorder in the United States. It is an exhausting condition that affects the lives of millions of people and their loved ones.