Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, The Sleep You’re Missing, The Sex You’re Not Having, and What’s Really Making You Crazy by Julie HollandMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I picked this up in a bookstore despite low expectations because I was interested in the topic, and I think it managed to somewhat exceed them.
The thesis is roughly: women tend to be different from men as a result of our differing hormone balances (and other factors both biological and cultural, but we’re focusing on the hormones here).
We tend to be:
- better at communication
- more empathetic
- more sensitive, with stronger emotions, more frequent mood changes, and lower tolerance for physical pain
- more conflict-averse, making us better at conflict resolution
These things are natural and fine, but they get stigmatized and medicalized by our patriarchal society, leading to the higher rates of depression and anxiety diagnoses in women. Medications, particularly hormonal birth control and SSRIs, can basically smooth women’s hormonal fluctuations and blunt our sensitivity, at the cost of the upsides.
She offers anecdotes such as a patient who called her crying from work asking to up her SSRI dose. When she dug into the reason why, she found out that the patient’s boss had yelled at her in front of a group of people and she had been embarrassed to break down crying. Instead of increasing the dose the patient agreed to talk to her boss and ask him to bring up issues more respectfully and privately.
My takes on all of this:
- I’m not sure how much I trust any of the science. I was expecting Cosmo-level and I think it was decently better than that: there was plenty of “well some studies on this show X, but others find no effect,” and despite the initial impression of anti-SSRI, anti-HBC polemic her actual view seems to be “these medications are super useful for lots of patients and I prescribe them often, but the effects vary by patient, many have negative reactions, and on the margin I think they’re overused.” nonetheless I’d take all the studies cited with a grain of salt
- a lot of the conclusions ended up being pretty boring “exercise and sunlight are good for you and have fewer side effects than SSRIs” type stuff
- the more interesting conclusions were stuff like “stress is a natural response to high pressure situations and isn’t in itself bad: it only becomes bad if you believe that it’s bad” (supposedly there were some studies showing this idk)
- I am kinda intrigued/convinced by the main thesis: I think to some extent I perceive a male-typical emotional range as “normal” and worry that deviations from that make me “crazy” or “too emotional” when it’s actually fine
- I felt unsatisfied by the conclusions though and ended up wanting more: like what does accepting that anxiety or mood swings are natural and okay look like, exactly?
Other random notes:
- It portrays estrogen as feel-good and progestin as depressing. Is this right? If so should we be more wary of progestin-only birth control?
- I liked the paean to crying: “Crying allows us to deeply feel what we’re feeling and then move on. It is a crescendo that naturally leads to a denouement of intensity. For most women, this depth of feeling is a birthright … have you ever noticed how often women apologize for crying? In part it’s because men are uncomfortable with expressed emotion, and so they, and we, have been socialized to shut it down.” It also points out that since men are a lot worse at identifying emotion than women, crying is practically useful since it’s the clearest signal men have that a woman is upset.
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