Many people confuse depression treatment with menopause treatment, but they are not the same things, even if they address some similar symptoms. The mood alterations during menopause and peri-menopause stem normally from fluctuations in hormones, and rather than requiring depression therapy, these can often be alleviated with diet or hormone therapy. This means that drug products that might normally be prescribed for depression might bypass the root cause of the problem even while bringing some measure of relief.
Menopause treatment, when dealing with depression, always needs to take into account the fact that estrogen plays some role in mood enhancement, while progesterone has a more destabilizing effect. Current treatments for transitional menopause symptoms generally involve some sort of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Yet many doctors recognize that if a woman has had depressive episodes in the past, or has even had post partum depression treatment at some point, HRT can in fact worsen the risk of depression when entering the menopausal phase.
That would mean that such women might consider seeking alternative treatments to alleviate menopausal symptoms, to try to avoid increasing their depression risk even further. And while there are vitamins and supplements that can help, sometimes the best treatments will simply be to exercise and eat properly. Making sure they eat a diet containing plenty of natural estrogens may improve a woman’s mood just as well as drugs, in many cases. A few examples of these foods would be lentils, beans, apples, broccoli, beets, tomatoes, squash and olives. And there are many more. All of this is part of the natural treatment of menopause in general, but depressive symptoms that go along with menopause are as likely to be relieved as other symptoms.
However, if a woman continues to have difficulty, and she really does need comprehensive menopause treatment like HRT, even if it might make the depression worse, then a doctor can recommend other standard methods of depression therapy be added to the hormone treatments. This would primarily include the prescription of antidepressants, along with the hormone treatments themselves. If a woman is severely depressed during this time of her life, it’s well worth exploring all possible health treatments to ensure that her transition through menopause is not a miserable experience.
Beth Kaminski is the leading expert in the field of treatment for panic attacks and treating anxiety disorder. For more information on tips to stop these attacks as well as how to prevent panic attacks, visit anxietydisordercure.com today.