The topic of depression in postmenopausal women was chosen because, although it is almost an "accepted fact" that postmenopausal women will suffer from depression, there seems to be little evidence to support the fact. As the human lifespan has grown longer with advances in the field of medicine, more women are living longer and are postmenopausal for a longer proportion of their lives. Any problems arising from menopause will have to be dealt with on a larger scale as the human lifespan increases and so it is important for medical and sociological reasons to define what these problems are and develop ways to treat them.
Many changes occur in a women at menopause, both physical and emotional, and she has reached a stage in her life when her familial and social roles have also changed. Changes in hormone levels at menopause affect women physically and mentally, and women have to adapt to a new role in society. No longer able to produce children, they must divert their efforts to other rewarding issues to maintain their sense of self-worth. For years, women have been lead to expect certain conditions to affect them at menopause, and it is only now that doctors are starting to look more critically at menopause to find out which of these conditions are truly due to the physical changes taking place at menopause and which are due to sociological changes taking place at the same time. Physical problems can be addressed medically with hormone replacement therapy and supplements, but sociological changes do not require medical treatment. Depression is one of the symptoms which women have been led to accept as a normal side-effect of menopause, but now this idea is being seriously questioned. This paper will critically analyze current writings on the subject, all of which contradict the common notion that menopause causes depression in women.
Nicol-Smith, L. (1996). Causality, menopause, and depression: a critical review of the...