The notion that menopause and depression are linked was a ‘fact’ commonly stated in medical textbooks well into this century. ‘They [menopausal women] are peevish, irritable, morose and depressed’, Emil Novak wrote in the classic 1923 text Menstruation and its Disorders. ‘The various psychoses of the menopause constitute an important group . . . Many [women] have full blown insanity with melancholia, paranoia and maniacal conditions.’
We can laugh now, but such views had a devastating effect on women’s lives. Many were placed in psychiatric hospitals for problems that could easily have had more to do with society’s weaknesses than theirs. Numerous recent studies have failed to confirm that depressive syndromes increase in middle-aged women. One of the largest studies, conducted by the US National Institute of Mental Health in the 1980s, found that women aged forty-five to sixty-four actually had significantly less depression than men in the same age group.
While fully developed depression is unusual at menopause, ‘feeling blue’ — or thunderously black — is quite common. It’s really hard to separate family stresses and things like financial problems from biological and psychological factors. For some women there seems to be a link between hot flushes, night sweats, insomnia, lethargy, and feeling decidedly depressed. If you are one of these, your cycle of sleeplessness may be broken if you get rid of the flushes with HRT. Even if you are sleeping well, you may find that HRT helps you to dispel uncharacteristically gloomy spells.
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