Menopause is another phase in a woman’s life that she has to undergo. For many women, menopause is a crossroad of physical, emotional and intellectual changes that they have to pass through all at the same time. To think about reaching this crossroad is already depressing but it really doesn’t have to.

During the menopausal stage, most women experience tension, mood swings, irritability, extra emotional sensitivity, anxiety and depression. All these emotional experiences are unusual for them or their character so they associate these as menopause symptoms. Actually, there is no definite biological or psychological happening that marks the beginning of the menopausal period. A lot of women who have gone through the menopausal period knew in retrospect that they were undergoing it 6 months or longer after their last and final menstrual period.

The menopausal period usually comes during midlife and during this stage in a woman’s life many other changes are also occurring in her life. Perhaps, her children are already getting married, going to college or trying to make their own lives and they experience the so-called empty nest syndrome. Or, she may be confronted by grief of a parent’s death and perhaps contemplating on her own mortality.

Moreover, a woman in her 50’s usually stops and looks at her life – her accomplishments, her financial security, emotional fulfillment, and social significance. If all these are not met according to her expectations, it creates pressure in her which eventually leads to feeling down and blue leading to depression. Also, during the menopausal period, a woman experiences physiological changes like the thinning of the vaginal cells which causes dryness of the vagina resulting to pain during sexual intercourse.

Adjustments to this change sometimes involves change in the way they view themselves as sexual beings leading to feelings of low self-esteem, then to depression. Moreover, most women dread the coming of menopausal period because for them, it means a decline of their youth and seeing these signs happening to them is depressing.

Depression can happen anytime in a person’s life. When your day is not so good, you feel down and blue at the end of the day and you say you are depressed. The day after, everything changes, you’re up again and the depression is gone. In the same way, depression is more like an emotional crisis that rises along with menopause. Thus, menopause and depression can come closely together but they are not linked to each other. Depending on a woman’s life experiences, she will have to cope up with this crisis for a long time, seek professional help or not at all.

Unless a woman had undergone ovarian surgery, the menopausal period would inevitably come to her sooner or later in her 50’s. But accepting it as a new phase in her life that implies maturity, gaining new insights, accepting new roles and embracing challenges, then menopause doesn’t have to be depressing.