Long-Term Birth Control Pill Use & Depression

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. David Thomas, I'm a practicing psychotherapist with the Whitford Thomas Group in Tampa, Florida here to discuss long term birth control pill use and depression. As in any long term medication use, the tendency might be to affect the normal functioning of your system. Certainly with birth control because we're dealing with hormones at the point, the long term use of birth control could in fact create all kinds of symptomatology. Depression could be one of those. To really determine that, you really would want to get an appointment, set an appointment with your gynecologist or your family physician to take a look at that to let them run blood on your to have a good physical to determine if you do have some imbalance in your system that could lend itself towards a depression. But remember most depression tends to be thinking depression so we want to tease out how you're looking at yourself, looking at other, looking at life events in your life currently and how that correlates with the depressed feelings. Also do you have any history of that? I'm not saying that long term birth control and some type of hormone imbalance couldn't contribute towards a depression, but we want to put it in context to how you're generally doing, how you're generally seeing yourself, others and the world around you to determine if there's not some thinking pieces there that is also contributing towards that depression. But certainly an appointment with your family physician, gynecologist would probably be the first step and let them kind of guide you from that point forward. Well hopefully this information regarding birth control, long term birth control and depression has been helpful to you today. From Tampa, Florida, I'm Dr. David Thomas."