Oral contraceptives: depression and frigidity.

Abstract

An attempt was made to correlate use of oral contraceptives with the development of mood and/or sexual disturbances and, if a relationship were found, to determine whether such disturbance fell into any predictable pattern. Hypotheses were chosen in seven broad categories: 1) previous history of psychiatric disorders; 2) current life stresses; 3) attitudes toward contraception; 4) symptoms due to expectations of the effect of the pill; 5) marital and sexual adjustment; 6) physiological alteration secondary to pill usage; 7) reaction to pregnancies. Thirty-nine women from a private patient population were studied. Sixteen experienced adverse psychological symptoms. Twenty-three had no emotional difficulty and were used as controls. This is a nonrandom sample, in that subjects with difficulties were sought. The women were studied by means of interviews and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Of those who had difficulty, eleven showed depressive reactions and five had loss of sexual interest and pleasure not related to depression. All developed these symptoms while on the oral contraceptives and lost them after discontinuance. The affected women could not be differentiated from their controls by means of any of the hypothesized variables. However, two factors tended to correspond with the development of adverse reaction: 1) use of the combined (as opposed to sequential) type of contraceptive pill and 2) age of the subject. The results suggest that women who have adverse reactions to oral contraceptives might represent a biochemically different subgroup in whom estrogen-progesterone steroids are the triggering mechanisms for mood and sexual disturbances.