Sarah Hill, professor of social psychology at Texas Christian University and author of This is your brain on birth control: The surprising science of sex, women, hormones and the law of unintended consequences, shares her journey into exploring the effects of oral contraception on mental health. “I actually spent my early career studying the way our sex hormones can affect psychological states and motivation…and the desire to attract romantic partners.” It wasn’t until Hill went off oral contraception herself that she began to connect the dots. “I started to feel so differently, that I started to really wonder what we did not know and about the way the pill affects the brain and the way that women experience the world.”

Hill recounts her personal experience and the research she conducted on the Pill’s effects, highlighting a range of impact on physical and mental wellbeing. Everything from “having less energy” to “being at a greater risk for depression and anxiety,” and how “it can reduce sexual desire and sexual functioning.”

Emily Dossett, a clinical associate professor of Psychiatry & the Behavioral Sciences at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, addresses another often-overlooked aspect of women’s health: the prevalence of mental health disorders before, during, and after pregnancy. Dossett underscores that “pregnancy is a time of tremendous and rapid physiological change,” and that “if a woman is susceptible, really to anything; diabetes, hypertension, cardiac disorders,” that pregnancies with those disorders “are more likely to come to the forefront or even emerge for the first time. The same is true for mental illness.”

Dossetts points out that society tends to attach immense joy to pregnancy and the celebration of pregnancy that women feel ashamed, even stigmatized, if they mention or complain about how they feel. “We're just realizing how common some of these challenges are in terms of mental health because we're just now at a point where we're allowing women to actually speak up about it.” Roughly “one out of every four to five women” suffer from some kind of mental disorder, Dossett says, with depression and anxiety being most common.

Because there has been little research on women’s mental health and pregnancy, Dossestt explains that there’s a general “lack of understanding and comprehension and naming of these disorders in the mental health world.” And when it comes to medication; “ the FDA, which approves all drugs, does not permit pregnant or lactating people to be included in drug trials.”

So, what options are available for women who require medication and aspire to conceive? “The question is not really whether or not these medications are safe but it's more of a risk, risk analysis for each individual person,” Dossett says.

“I firmly believe everyone has the right to have a child. Everyone has the right to not have a child and everyone has the right to raise a child in a safe and healthy environment. Those are the tenets of what we call reproductive justice. And I believe they apply to people with mental illness just like anyone else.”

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This week, Terry Real, renowned couples therapist and author “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship” reflects on the keys to building a successful long term relationship. In order to change inherited behaviors and dysfunction, Real cites his own struggle with family trauma and offers hope that with courage, discipline and hardwork change is indeed possible.

This episode of Life Examined with Terry Real was originally broadcast June 23rd, 2024

If you’ve ever been accused of ‘gaslighting' someone, you might find yourself unsure about what exactly you're being accused of. The term is the latest amongst a growing collection of popular psychological buzzwords used to describe manipulative or calculating behavior, but it's often misused and misunderstood.

The term originated from the 1940s black-and-white film Gaslight where a husband manipulates his wife into thinking she’s crazy by subtly adjusting the intensity of their home's gas lights when she’s alone in the house. The husband denies there’s anything wrong with the lights, leaving his wife distraught, confused, and questioning her own memory and sanity.

In her book The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life “The Gaslight Effect,” psychoanalyst Robin Stern explains why this word has gained so much prominence in both personal and professional relationships, particularly among women. “Seeing many women come into my office who were otherwise in their lives the presidents of their company, professional practice, or very successful –good decision makers who felt comfortable in groups, socialized quite a bit, suddenly, in their romantic relationship were uncertain; felt a kind of dislocated or unmoored, felt unstable and second-guessed themselves all the time, [saying to themselves], am I too sensitive, am I too paranoid?”

Stern says that “gaslighting” is an “insidious and sometimes covert form of emotional abuse.” Being gaslit is “a power dynamic repeated over time where the gaslighters intention is to undermine and destabilize the ‘gaslightee’ and lead that person to second-guess themselves, to question their own identity and ultimately their sanity and their character at different times.”

Stern argues that being able to spot this type of behavior is important. When “gaslighting” happens professionally, it can be tough to tackle. For example, Stern cites doctor/patient relationships and warns that “if your doctor minimizes your symptoms, if he or she continually interrupts you or accuses you of being too preoccupied with your symptoms, or refuses to order follow-up tests or if you constantly feel like your doctor is rude, condescending, belittling, or passing it off, as ‘that's your age, or you're a woman, or you're a new mom’ or whatever it is, you're being gaslighted.”

After recognizing the behavior, Stern suggests taking action. “Opt out of those power struggles and sort out the truth from the distortion…Nobody needs to put up or should put up with abuse. It is not acceptable for anyone to be intentionally hurting someone else.”