Dr. Sarah Hill warns that hormonal birth control prescribed to teenage girls may increase lifetime depression risk and alter brain development during critical years. Most doctors don't discuss these long-term mental health risks with teens or parents, focusing instead on immediate symptom relief.
Nobody's really thought to ask the question until very recently about what happens to teenage girls and what happens to brain development when you put them on hormonal birth control during this time when the brain is still rapidly changing from being its, like, little kid version of itself into the grown-up version of itself. There is some research now that suggests that going on hormonal birth control when you are in your teenage years, when your brain is still developing, that it does seem to increase the risk of developing major depressive disorder throughout the lifetime, even after you've gone off of it. And this suggests that it may lead to developmental changes in the brain that ultimately may not be favorable to women. And this is something that I think everybody needs to be aware of, especially teens and parents of teens, because many doctors are not having these conversations. They don't even think about it, you know. They're just taught like, oh, you know, if you've got a teenager who has this problem or that problem, you can give them this and it's just going to eliminate the problem, without thinking about like, oh, what does this do to brain development anyway? Because the brain isn't done developing, and sex hormones are kind of an important driver of these pubertal brain changes. And so it's crazy, but very few doctors talk about this.
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