Depression, the gift of sexual freedom
I was looking over a chart not long ago and saw a combination of medicines that caught my eye. The young woman I was caring for was taking an oral contraceptive and an antidepressant. Nothing unusual, except that it occurs to me that I frequently see that combination, especially in high-school and college-aged single women.
Maybe it’s nothing, but I wonder how the two are linked. Ask many young men these days about women and they’ll tell you that the women they know are “crazy”. They’re possessive, dramatic, anxiety prone, clinging, grasping and emotional. Ask the same men about women taking birth control pills and they’ll express a certain gratitude, exhale a sigh of relief. Ask young women about men and they’ll say that young men are superficial, groping, over-sexed, non-committal, immature and self-absorbed.
I’m no psychiatrist. I’m a physician, a husband. I am also a father, not only of three sons but of one daughter. Over the years I have learned about women, mostly by being married to one but now by the process of raising one. And I’ve learned that women are specially wired for relationships. My daughter is completely connected to everyone in her world. She even establishes family relationships with her dolls. When she sees someone cry she says, “he needs his mama”. Little girls are clear about the need for security and connection. It begins at birth, probably before.
All women are designed to establish relationships and maintain them. They are also made to incorporate physical intimacy into the appropriate relationships, rather than have it as a stand-alone activity. So, when young women are expected to engage in sex without the security of a lasting relationship, without the hope of a lasting connection with their partner, they become uncomfortable. It violates their programming. Deep inside, in the place they allow very few to see, it breaks their hearts.
Broken hearts can cause depressed minds. And that, I suspect, is one of the major reasons that so many women are taking antidepressants along with their birth control pills. Here they are, young, thrilled by life, full of passion and anxious to share their minds, their spirits, even their bodies with someone whom they love. But once they do, that someone decides that it was fun for a while, but that it’s time to move on to the next person. Of course young women become depressed. Why shouldn’t they?
Popular culture gurus, as well as the entertainment industry, seem bent on sabotaging young lives. Women’s magazines suggest that their readers should be just as sexually casual as men. Movies and television portray romance which is almost always tied to a series of sexual encounters. Men’s magazines give a formula for becoming sensitive sexual predators who know they aren’t in for the long haul, but who are willing to learn the technical science of good sex, willing to dress and perform to attain the physical goal, interested enough to learn to understand just enough of the female mind, but not too much. The idea seems at worst to promote blatant promiscuity, at best to offer serial monogamy as the best alternative. All in the interest of emotional and sexual health. All in the age of infidelity, divorce and depression. All in the age of HIV when sex and death seem to lie so often together.
Oral contraceptives and antidepressants for women. But what for men? Self-deception, mostly. Men are taught, by other men, to enjoy women, use women, find other women. Unfortunately, it’s false and destructive. The male of the species is born for relationship as surely as the female. Culture just does its best to de-program, to blind men so that their need for intimacy is camouflaged as a need for sex, and their desire for security with a woman is hidden, for fear that it means weakness.
I hope someone out there is doing it differently. I hope someone’s little girls are being encouraged to hold out for real love, real commitment. And I hope someone with a little boy about two or three is planning to teach him that women, or particularly a woman, will need his heart before his body. I hope that boy learns how important it is to find someone to love permanently. So that when my little girl begins to notice and be noticed by boys, by men, she won’t need the unfortunate combination of anti-depressants and birth control pills to cope with her repeatedly broken heart.
Wow! Just wow! 110 % correct. Your children are lucky to have such a good father.
Books have come out in the last several years (the titles escape me now) about the culture of “hooking up” and other issues with young women and the effect on them. I have long thought that we are not meant for promiscuity, no matter how much we fool ourselves.
Thank you. You are so articulate. I’m printing this out for my daughter and all her friends.
I am saddened by the combination of those two drugs as well and agree with you that the use of one probably leads to the other. And by the way, there are some of us out there who are still withholding the gift of sex until the committment of marriage. Thanks for the wonderfully written post.
SRH
P. S. For my own amusement, I am compiling a list of reasons for why it’s best to wait for marriage/why it’s less than smart to not wait to have sex. May I have your permission to put your post on my list? I would be happy to send you my finished product (Or at least the beginning draft, since I might keep adding to it for a while!).
Let me know at
unordinaryday(at)gmail(dot)com
Wow, I learned so much, thank you!
Sad and true. I wish someone had explained it to me this way when I was younger. Instead, I just got told over and over not to have sex until marriage. It doesn’t really mean anything when you don’t understand why you shouldn’t do something. And it doesn’t help when parents are unavailable or too judgmental to answer questions.
Thanks for writing this.
Wonderful piece. As a father of two boys and one little girl it really hit home. I found myself feeling frustrated, angry, and sad as I read it. My cynical mind began thinking…there’s probably a pharmaceutical marketer reading this wondering how to combine birth-control and antidepressants into one, magical pill!
Dr. Leap, this particular post stuck in my head for quite awhile. I posted it for discussion on a message board I moderate, and there is quite a lively discussion going on over there, if you’re interested.
Here is the link:
http://messageboard.tuckermax.com/showthread.php?t=25609
Semper Fi,
Savage Henry
Thank you- very thought provoking
Mark Gungor is the founder/presenter of “Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage”, although the concepts are certainly sound for none marriage relationships.
He has a great section called “Be nice to the girl” that helps capture much of what has been said and presents in a very understandable format.
His “Tale of Two Brains” is also a funny but pointed discussion of how different mene & women are. Better understanding of ourselves and our significant other can’t hurt!
Attaching a link from his website/blog
http://www.laughyourway.com/blog/is-an-affair-really-love/
Hello,
Fisrt, i would like to apologize to everyone for my approximative english! I will try to be clear
Honestly, I am disappointed to read this kind of very sensitive post from a doctor. Not that I disagree with it -because I can’t reject a wise man opinion like this-, but because I humbly think you’re maybe missing some points in your text. Please let me explain
Do you really think MOST of young women feel uncomfortable and take pill and anti depressant JUST because society makes them doing things against their natures? That young men try to push them to have sex as they are not ready for it? It could be a part of the problem, but while reading it we can feel that you want to tell us there’s no other reason than broken hearts.
Can’t it be the ultra-competitive shape of the american society, especially during college when everyone have to prove themselves to the community? Can’t it be some kind of “trend” which makes every woman able to get a prescription like this able to feel cool or even normal, like classic panurgism?
Maybe you could light my fire, I don’t know if you have the time but it would help me to understand some things on ths kind of subject.
Thanks in advance.
Anxiety and depression is one hell of a nasty disease. even if you have everything but if you have clinical depression, you are still nothing.;-`
anxiety and depression are hard to treat if the patient has not been checked for years..:*