What’s the Most Effective Menopause Treatment?

Depression therapy for menopausal and peri-menopausal women can either be very useful, or in certain cases it might turn out to be somewhat misguided. This is because of a few misconceptions that have made the rounds for many years about what actually happens during this time in a woman’s life. Menopause treatment is not at all the same thing as treatment for depression. Most mood fluctuations during this time simply relate to hormone changes, and may be managed with diet or hormone therapy, except in severe cases. This means that the drug products that work for depression, while they may bring some relief to menopausal women, might not address the real causes of depressive symptoms.

menopause treatment

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.

There are other symptoms of menopause, and sometimes women genuinely do need the broad forms of menopause treatment, including HRT, even if these treatments also increase the risk of depression. When that is the case, doctors agree that normal depression therapy should accompany the hormone treatments, and should include antidepressant medications. Rather than making women suffer through untreated depression, all possible health treatments should be made available to them.

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