Julie Holland - Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs Youre Taking, The Sleep Youre Missing, The Sex Youre Not Having, and Whats Really Making You Crazy

W omen today are overworked and exhausted. We are anxious and frazzled, yet depressed and burned out. Our moods and libidos are at a rock-bottom low, our vital energies drained as we struggle to keep up with work, family, and hundreds of friends online. We blame ourselves for how bad we feel, thinking we should be able to handle it all. We dream of being perfect; we even try to make it look effortless, but we were never meant to be so static. We are designed by nature to be dynamic, cyclical, and, yes, moody. We are moody bitches, and that is a strengthnot a weakness.

We evolved that way for good reasons; our hormonal oscillations are the basis for a sensitivity that allows us to be responsive to our environment. Our dynamism imparts flexibility and adaptability. Being fixed and rigid does not lend itself to survival. In nature, you adapt or you die. There is tremendous wisdom and peace available to us if we learn how our brains and bodies are supposed to work. Moodinessbeing sensitive, caring deeply, and occasionally being acutely dissatisfiedis our natural source of power.

Yet we have been told just the opposite. From a young age, we are taught that moodiness, and all that comes with it, is a bad thing. We learn to apologize for our tears, to suppress our anger, and to fear being called hysterical. Over the course of womens lives, the stresses and expectations of the modern world interfere with our health and hormones in ways big and small, and the result is the malaise so many women feel. There simply is a better way.

Moody Bitches opens the playbook on how we can take hold of our moods and, in so doing, take hold of our lives. By integrating timeless wisdom with todays science, we can master our moods. If we can understand our own bodies, our naturally cycling hormones, and how modern medicines derange our exquisitely calibrated machines, then we can make informed choices about how to live better.

Womens hormones are constantly in flux. They ebb and flow over a month-long cycle and they wax and wane throughout decades of fertility, vacillating with particular volatility during adolescence and perimenopause, the spring and autumn of the reproductive years. Compare this to mens stable hormone levels throughout most of their lives. Our hormonal variations allow us to be empathic and intuitiveto our environment, to our childrens needs, and to our partners intentions. Womens emotionality is normal. It is a sign of health, not disease, and it is our single biggest asset. Yet are choosing to medicate away their emotionality with psychiatric medications, and the effects are more far-reaching than most women realize.

Whether its food, alcohol, drugs, cell phones, or shopping, we all rely on something in order to numb ourselves during difficult times. Whatever the chosen substance, it offers a welcome promise: that things will be different and better once it is consumed. But you can never get enough of something that almost works, and because our solutions are usually synthetic, not natural, we come up short. We are uncomfortable in our own skin, with our own desires; we are not at ease in our homes and offices, in our roles as parents or caretakers of our parents. Plowing forward, we think we can outrun the angst if we just stay insanely busy.

In my psychiatric practice, my patients, like most women, are starved for information about the drugs theyre taking and how they can change how theyre feeling. Moody Bitches is an answer to both problems. I name names (which medicines I love, and the ones I avoid) and discuss the real side effects Ive observedweight gain, libido loss, becoming blasand what you can do about them. I share straight talk about enhancing your sex life, the direct link between food and mood, sticking to exercise or sleep schedules, and perhaps the most important piece: tuning in to your body to realign with your natural, primal self.

When I started my practice twenty years ago, women came to me confused by their symptoms and unsure of what to do. They complained of difficulty getting back to sleep or agitation or tearfulness, but they didnt quite know what was wrong. I helped them put a name to their symptoms and explained that there were medicines that could help. I needed to do more teaching about drug therapy back then, and a lot more hand-holding. I would set aside the last ten or fifteen minutes of the hour-long initial consultation in order to quell the fears of people who were wary of taking something that would alter their brain chemistry.

These days, new patients come to me sure that they need medicine for their nerves or their moods, like most of the other women they know. They want me only to help them figure out which one. The confusion used to be: I cant understand why I keep waking up at four in the morning; Its so hard to get out of bed and I dont really care about anything; Im angry all the time, and I dont know why. But over the years, the conversation has morphed, so that now it usually begins with something like this: Can you tell me the difference between Wellbutrin and Effexor?; I cant figure out if I have ADD or OCD; Do you know that ad with the woman riding the horse on the beach?; Is that new butterfly sleeping pill better than Ambien? And the one I hear more than you can imagine from my established patients: Is there anything new I can try?

The drug companies started direct-to-consumer advertising in the 1980s. Soon after I started my private practice in the mid-1990s, it became less heavily regulated. Ads started springing up on television and in magazines, trumpeting the latest antidepressants and sleeping pills. I went along for the ride as Americas use of all prescription psychiatric medications tripled during the nineties, as a direct result of this powerful marketing. had made more money than Tide detergent, and it became clear to me that something new was happening. Drug companies are spending billions of dollars to turn normal human experiences like fear or sadness into medical diseases. They arent developing cures; theyre creating customers. The problem is not our emotionality; the problem is that we are being persuaded to medicate it away.