Unhappy Pill

A study came out last week that should have caused great alarm. For 13 years, researchers at the University of Copenhagen studied more than a million women between the ages of 15 and 34 who were taking a type of drug — one that is popular in all developed countries. Taking this drug, the researchers found, correlated with an increase in the risk of depression. The correlation was particularly strong in adolescent girls, who showed an 80 per cent higher chance of being diagnosed with depression.

Usually when a story about women’s health and depression breaks, a phalanx of activists and campaigners pop up all over the media to ‘raise awareness’ of the issue. Last week, however, barely a peep — the papers carried the story and a few online sites ran delicately objective surveys of women on the pill, but there were few howls of outrage.

Why the muted response? The answer is that the type of drug in question was hormonal contraception, and it is today a sin just to suggest that it may not be the greatest gift ever given to womankind. Almost everybody agrees that female contraceptives — pills, implants, patches or intrauterine devices — have liberated us; set us free to be sexually active human beings. Few dare raise concerns about that, because to do so is to risk being called a prude, and nobody wants that.

There are plenty of questions to be asked, though. Not least because 3.5 million British women are on the combined contraceptive pill — known as the ‘Pill’ — and the study showed that those who take it were 23 per cent more likely to be on antidepressants — possibly taking pills to cope with the Pill.