Progesterone on Mental Illness: Friend or Foe?

Psychiatric illnesses have become a prodigious obstacle that many people face today. The issue has come to rise over the last decade. Today, over 1 in 10 youths in America alone experience depression that causes difficulty for them to do everyday tasks like go to school or to work (Mental Health America 2022). Recently, it has been shown that the hormone progesterone plays a surprising role in our brain. It was first introduced as being a protective barrier to the brain against stroke (Nguyen, Su, and Singh 2018). Considering this information, researchers began looking into what else progesterone does for the brain.

Women are more susceptible to progesterone’s effects because it’s primarily a female sex hormone. During menopause, women experience a lot of hormonal changes including changes in progesterone levels. The findings in women who experience both high levels of progesterone and a “withdrawal” of it seem to have had similar experiences (Standeven, McEvoy, and Osborne 2020). High levels of progesterone enhance anxiety symptoms while low levels result in an enhancement of depression-like behaviors. Through this finding, it was concluded that progesterone does not have a direct correlation to mood.

Depression during women pregnancies and postpartum were taken into account as well. Researchers began looking at late pregnancies which was a time of high progesterone and found more negative moods than in postpartum. However, they still were not successful in finding a relationship with progesterone levels (Standeven, McEvoy, and Osborne 2020). It is clear that we still don’t know much about progesterone and how it affects mental illness or mood in general. There are some studies that say withdrawal of progesterone could be a cause in depression or anxiety while others say that high levels of progesterone could lead to that same result. Some studies even show no relationship between the two. It’s clearly something we must look deeper into and find out if it's something that varies from person to person or if progesterone really does have a limited amount of things it does for the brain.

This research did not look specifically into psychiatric illnesses, either. Surprisingly enough, there aren’t any experiments that I could find that look specifically into that. Osborne and her colleagues looked specifically into women’s progesterone during menopause and pregnancy and how that could correlate to depression or anxiety. This is the closest research I could find for this topic of interest. It’s truly mesmerizing that this wasn’t looked into before but we are learning and making progress everyday. I do hope that in the future we are able to say that we have more information on this and that we are able to help those struggling with mental health.

Works Cited:

M;, N. T. S. C. S. (n.d.). Let-7I inhibition enhances progesterone-induced functional recovery in a mouse model of ischemia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30237284/ 

Standeven, L. R., McEvoy, K. O., & Osborne, L. M. (2020, November). Progesterone, reproduction, and psychiatric illness. Best practice & research. Clinical obstetrics & gynecology. Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8011861/ 

The state of Mental Health in America. Mental Health America. (n.d.). Retrieved October 14, 2022, from https://mhanational.org/issues/state-mental-health-america