#1814 The Pill's Hidden Toll on Teenage Girls - David Gillespie

the writing of the article is so fucking good. So the article is called The Price of Liberation The Pills hit in toll on teenage Girls. It's on substack and find that have a read of that is my suggestion, because really it is more significant. It is give or take three and a half thousand words, but it is worth the time and the energy investment because it is a revelation for guys and girls, I think anyway, that is my opinion. I didn't intend to read it all.

I thought, oh, this looks interesting. What's golespo? And then I started reading. I went, oh, this is significant. This baggage up to page and when I don't have time for this, and then I read it all and it's just awesome. I'm just going to read the first bit because I want to set it up.

had four and a half five kids. I can't remember the exact statistics, but it was a lot, and it didn't have any labor saving devices. It had kids, so it had the mother usually at home. She was the labor saving device or the person doing all the work, and the kids were there and they were expected to get out of the way or help, and there was no concept of entertaining or indulging kids at that time.

It was just they were extra labor. But that shifted dramatically when you compared that time to now where where the average household is full of labor saving devices. So the average homemaker in nineteen forty five, I don't know, was doing sixty seventy hours a week of labor. Now they're doing about fourteen. And the difference is all the devices and so on. But also it changed the status of the kids. You know, now I have one point, whatever it is, you know, we're not even at replacement

levels in Australia at the moment. And that dramatically changed the way we treated kids. Kids were no longer the labor force, you know, and expected to get in there and help. They became the prodigies that you know, had to be indulged at all costs and no horrible things could ever happen to them, you know, especially the word no. And you know, it was a dramatic shift, and I noticed it, and I didn't really draw much attention to it in writing that book, but it stuck with me.

That's a very big change. And so when I was writing Teen Brain about changes in the teenagers' brains that occurred because of adolescence and the way the hormones work in puberty. I came across this massive study in in Denmark, and you know, a little bit of a spoiler alert at the end of this article, is I finished or towards the end of this article I talk about this study.

And what blew me away about this study is it was massive, a million women between the ages of fifteen and thirty four a million, And what they had studied was the effect of birth control on these women's mental health, So was the incidence of anxiety and depression and obviously other things like suicide, self harm, etc. Was it in any way related or correlated with whether or not a woman was taking hormonal birth control, that is, the pill or the longer acting versions of it like IUDs and

so on and injectibles. And the answer was pretty damn shocking as far as I'm concerned. When this study came out twenty sixteen, which was about when I was writing that book, and it said what they found was that women between the ages of fifteen and thirty four who were on the pill were twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and depression, not a little bit more likely, not a little bit here or there, or you know,

bit hard to call twice as likely. And worse than that, when you look at a particular age group, the fifteen to nineteen year olds who were on long term or monal birth control, it was three times as likely. So the group who are most likely to have severe adverse outcomes from anxiety and depression, which is teenage girls, were three times as likely to have those outcomes if they were on birthnroll. And I thought, Wow, this is a shocking statistic, and I kind of slipped it into teen brain,

but not really. It doesn't really have a home in there. It's just it's in there. And I've always wanted to really drill in to the pill and write the story of the pill and understand how we got to this place where we are happily giving a hormonal steroid medication to young girls, often not for birth control, which we'll talk about later, and we're happily doing that and blithely ignoring major studies that say this is really dangerous to do. Yeah,

I mean I've never come across that. I've never come across that in everyday media, in people talking, but no one says anything about, Hey, I'll by the way, you know, the pill significantly increases the chances of anxiety and depression in teenage girls, well not just teenage girls, in any woman, but particularly in teenage girls.

progesterone did affect a female's ability to reproduce. So if it was added, you could it made periods less painful, It could be used for all kinds of gynecological and obstetric treatments. Trouble was it was hideously expensive because it had to be extracted from animals, and so it wasn't much uptake for it because only really very rich people

would have had any real access to it. And that sent a doctor, well actually he was more of a research scientist than a doctor, out on the hunt, a fellow by the name of Russell Marker on the hunt for he felt he'd heard rumors, you know, and read some things about some types of yam, in particular one growing in Mexico, which is bloody huge. I've put a photo of it in the article.

He actually found a local shopkeeper and together they managed to harvest ten tons of these yams and extracted eventually extracted progesterone from it, and well produced it from the things they extracted from. Boy with the details, but anyway, the result was that you could produce progesterone extremely cheaply using these dams. And when the doctors who were out looking at progesterone studies heard about this, they thought, well, hang on a sec. Now there's a bit of a market.

Now we can actually get the raw ingredient we need at an affordable price. So all those sorts of things came together along. But that's just science that on its own doesn't make the pill. What made the pill was in fact a suffragette, a famous suffragette who who by the name of Margaret Sanger, who had been campaigning for the better part of thirty or forty years by the time this all happened, for the right for women to choose when they got pregnant. Now, Margaret was a nurse

and she'd seen the results of endless unwanted pregnancy. You know, essentially the birth control was not under the control of the women. The wife often in these situations, and they had as many children as nature would allow, And it meant that a woman's lot at about that time, up to the end of World War two was really controlled entirely around an endless cycle of having children. So that's all the free labor came from. That, I noticed when

I was writing the other book. And she campaigned on the basis that, look, this is not fair, this is not right. A woman should be able to say when either when she's getting pregnant in the first place, or when she's had enough children. And so she had been advocating that for a long time. She'd started one of the first birth control clinics, which was essentially handing out pamphlets on when to have sex in the month and

things like that, sort of timing things. And she'd managed to get arrested for that, by the way, because it was illegal to tell women how to control their pregnant their fertility. Wrested, she got thirty hours in the workhouse for that one thirty days in the workhouse for that, But it didn't stop her. She had been campaigning fiercely for these rights for a long time. When she heard about the possibility that there might be a way to create a pill that you could take that would control

your fertility. She was all over it. She put the scientists together with the doctors. She even arranged the funding. Another famous suffragette who Catherine McCormick, who was in fact an heiress to the International Harvest of Fortune and had had piles of cash. But she was very, very famous in the Suffragetta the Votes for Women Arena. She put up the money. Dr Pinkus, who was the one that Marca was introduced to, started the research. They even got

involved with the condition by the name of doctor rock. Now. He was an interesting addition to the whole thing because he was a fierce Catholic and he actually smoothed the way from an ethical perspective. He campaigned endlessly for the Capital Church to change its stance on birth control to at least permit the use of a hormonal contraceptive. He didn't succeed, but his involvement sort of I don't know, church washed the whole thing, and it also meant there

was a bit of an ethical shield. Nothing untoward was going on here. This was all totally above board, with absolute good intent. The end result was that by the mid nineteen fifties are ready to do some experiments. They are on humans, you know, as was the case in those days, they did an experiment on Western humans. They found some impoverished humans nearby and went to Puerto Rico and did their experiments. But it was astoundingly successful, so

that the pill worked. It did control birth most of the time. It's not one hundred percent effective, but.

whether or not they had more. So these were often older women who were further in their path in life, and that was how it was really marketed at the time in the early nineteen sixties, as were sold it was a revolution. It fundamentally changed swung the pendulum the other direction about who had control over whether or not a woman became pregnant. It was the revolution Margaret Sanger thought it would be. It was the revolution she'ds bought,

fought most of a century to have. And that's all terrific. The downside come when we start handing these things out to teenage girls. Now that's where the problem comes. Now you might say, well, why are we handing these things out to teenage girls? If you know anything about teen sex statistics, you definitely say why are we handing these things out to teenage girls? Because in the last twenty years, teenage girls are having fifteen percent less sex than their

mothers were. The incidence of teen sex is actually dropping like a stone. We've probably talked about this, but I'll just mention it again. The reason for that is because it's very hard to have sex with someone if you're spending the whole day in your bedroom on your iPhone. So people are getting dopamine stimulation from programs written to manipulate their dopamine rather than from interacting in real life with real people who could get them pregnant. So that's

a big part of it. Since the when you look at the statistics for teen sex, they're actually trending upwards until twenty eleven, and then from twenty eleven till now, they've they've fallen dramatically, and that's because.

five percent. Yeah, twenty five percent increase over the same period that we've had a fifteen percent decrease in people having sex. So less people are having sex, well, less teenage girls are having sex. Yes, we're selling a quarter more of the pill to those people in that period. What are they doing with it if they're not using it for sex? The answer is acne. The thing that the iPhone and the iPad brought along was a whole lot of curated perfection. There's you wouldn't I mean, eighty

five percent of teenagers get acne. You wouldn't know it from looking at the average Instagram feed. No one has acne. Now. The thing about it is that the pill is an extraordinarily effective treatment for acne. It is very effective, and so it's often the reason why a teenage girl is on the pill. There are other reasons which have nothing to do with sex as well, which is, you know, difficult or regular or painful periods. It helps there too. So when they've done surveys of who why are people

on the pill? Four out of five teenage girls are on the pill or something that some reason other than to prevent themselves becoming pregnant. Remembering that the target market for the pill was never teenage girls. The tiger market for the pill was married women, often who'd already had children. So but now this thing that the market has crept

out and the pharmaceutical companies don't mind. I'm sure that there's a much bigger market for this thing, and it's now being given for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with getting pregnant, and but you know, also have the side benefit that you know, if I don't know, if accidents happened, then you probably won't get pregnant either. So that's an issue. And you might say, well, that's a bit terrible. But what about this thing about

the study that I mentioned before about the depression? Why would that be the case? Have we got to have we got to buy a chemical explanation for that? Why would teenage girls be more depressed and anxious if they are on the pill. What on earth does progesterone have with anxiety and depression. That's the interesting question that I like to come back to, which is what's going on there?

And some really interesting science has been done in this area because we know some stuff about the teenage brain. We know that when males and females anto puberty, a hormone called GABA. Well, GABBA gets turned off, or more accurately, it gets turned off so we can enter puberty. Gabba

is a breaking system in the body. It's what stops us entering puberty the day after we're born, so it holds us at that state of pre puberty for ten twelve years before the rest of the body is in a position to allow us to go that last ten years of building a human which actually builds the higher order parts of the thinking in human brain. So that

hormone gets dialed right down and puberty commences. Now, the problem is that that hormone is a general purpose shutter down er of things, and one of the things that shuts down is addiction. So it actually when it's dialed up, as it is in children or people over the age of about twenty two, it's much harder to become addicted. It's also much harder to be anxious and much harder to be depressed. This thing is like a breaking system

that stops those things happening. But there's particularly vulnerable period of human development that you have to go through called puberty, where we turn off the thing that stops that happening, and so we become more likely to be addicted anxious depressed, which is of course why adolescents are the people who become addicted anxious depressed most addictions, Almost all addictions start during that period because that's the point when the human

brain is most susceptible to it. It's also why allmost all anxiety and depression starts during that period. Okay, so what's they got to do with the pill? Well, what the pill does is jam us in, well, jam jam females in what's called the luteal phase of you know, the ovulation phases. And that's how it works. It's basically convincing the brain, oh, ovulation has already finished, it's over and done with. We're cool. So the brain thinks it's pregnant.

It thinks the body is pregnant. And therefore that's how the pill works, you know, in the shortest possible way. I do go to a bit more detail on the article for those of you who are interested or don't know, but it the end result of that is that it just so happens that the luteal phase is the phase where GABBA is totally suppressed.

What the pill does is jam them in that phase permanently, so there is your connection. That's why the study is showing that women who are on the pill are more susceptible to anxiety and depression than women who are not, and in particular women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen.

less affected by it you are. But the particularly dangerous time is that early part of puberty where gabber is suppressed anyway, and then you're suppressing it with the pill. So none of this was contemplated by the Hugaret Sayer or any of the folks I talk about in the article. How could it be? They didn't even have in mind that you would be giving this to fifteen year old girls.

What they were thinking about was women controlling how many children they had, usually married women who'd already had children. And for those women, whilst there still is a risk because you are still putting them into a permanent luteal phase which suppresses GABBA, their risk is much much lower than doing it to a teenage girl. And so we are in the midst of an epidemic of anxiety and depression amongst teenagers in general, but also in particular amongst

teenage girls. And we are prescribing a steroid hormone that we know has these effects to those girls, not generally to stop them becoming pregnant or for them to plan how many pregnancies they have, but to stop them having acne.

health issues out of that. But I've never heard maybe it has been had, but I've never heard this conversation we had in mainstream media once. And then you go fifteen to nine year olds three hundred percent more likely to suffer from like just that's enough, Just let's start there.

publicly about this. I would have thought, well, that's going to start making all kinds of warnings about whether or not the pill should be being used, particularly by teenage girls. But I haven't seen anything. And I wonder then why we're not seeing that kind of thing. Because it's hard

to say that this is nonsense. You could if it were just that study, you could just say, oh, well, yeah, correlation does an equal causation, could be minion things that explains that who knows sure, but correlation andy not equal causation. But it does raise a flag that says, look at this closely because something might be going on that we

need to know about. And when you can come up with a reasonably well justified mechanical explanation for why what you're observing is occurring, that's when you really need to

pause to think. And all of the things that I've given you today about gabba suppression, a luteal phase, all that sort of thing that is all undisputed, uncontroversial statements that we know to be true, and it provides a very reasonable explanation for what that study observed, which is that there is a significant risk with these steroidal pills

during those phase for teenage girls. Now, there are often, I'm sure there are teenage girls who must be on the pill, and I don't want to stand here and diss the pill for that, right, I mean, there are always medically justifiable reasons for this, But its use is exploding. It has increased by a quarter in the last fifteen years. And why it is being used is not necessarily for birth control or even to deal with difficult periods, but

for things like acne. Now, the other thing that I briefly touch on in the article is one of the longer term consequences of putting people on the pill is that have nothing to do with the things we talked about so far, is that it masks symptoms of something that is starting to become a very very real problem

in society, and that's endometriosis. The difficulty is it's often first diagnosed when a woman comes off the pill in her mid thirties, and the reason she's coming off the pill is because she's decided she wants to have children and then can't have children, and they discover that, oh, well, your fertility has been affected by you know, many many

years of undiagnosed endometriosis. And that's a difficulty because you've got the pill masking symptoms that would have alerted a physician much much earlier on that there was something that needed treatment.

And so while I just think it's maybe a good conversation to keep having, and I just I wish that the mainstream media would go, hey, could you know that article you wrote, could we have a chat about that, because, I mean, one of the challenges with having conversations like this that are deeply personal and affect people like birth control and all of the myriad of hormonal and psychological and emotional issues that happen it can happen to women

young and older, is that obviously there's emotion around it, right, and people like, who the fuck are you, Craig Harbert, I'm saying I'm a nobody. I'm just a bloke with a podcast, so there's no you know, I'm not making any statements other than this is when I read this. When I read this article, I just went, this is a really articulate, well researched, well thought through for me, this is just an important thing to open up to further discussion. So mate, well done. I'll let you have

the final say in a moment. But just reminding you everyone, it's on substack. The name of the article is just follow David on substack anyway of subscriber, whatever you want to do in pay a bit or pay nothing. The Price of Liberation The Pills Sitting Toll on teenage Girls. It was out March one, twenty twenty five. Any kind of wrap up thoughts.

about it. What I do want to draw people's attention to is that there is solid research here which to me is concerning and it should be getting more attention.