May is Mental Health Awareness Month. As ads encourage all of us to take stock of our stress levels,

priorities, and overall well-being, we encourage women to also assess their mental health as influenced

by hormonal birth control.



Some women take birth control and experience few notable physical or emotional side effects. Many

others, however, are reporting increased anxiety, depression, anger, fear, even fits of rage, and suicidal

thoughts that they have directly tracked to their hormone birth control.

These reports are from personal stories shared with our office by clients and women in the community.

At first, we believed the incidents to be the exception rather than the rule. Still, the more women we

have talked to, the more we have discovered that having no side effects might be the exception and

strong adverse mental/emotional effects the rule.

It’s not surprising that a pill affecting hormones would also impact feelings, which are often intensified

by hormones. Most women who have shared concerns also report that they weren’t warned about the

possible emotional side effects of hormone-based birth control. In fact, a few said that their doctors

dismissed or even ridiculed their emotional symptoms, blaming other factors. Yet, each woman said that

after she stopped taking the hormone birth control, she started to feel more in control of her emotions

within a few days or weeks.

This is in no way a formal study on the impact of hormone-based birth control. This is women telling

women what they wished they had known sooner. If you are experiencing out-of-control feelings and

are on hormone birth control, please consider investigating the impact those hormones could have on

your mental health. Talk to a doctor willing to consider you as an individual and your reactions to

various hormones. Better mental health could be close.