Semen has an antidepressant effect -- on women.
Sexual healing
A study suggests that semen has an antidepressant effect
on women.
By Plapet
Friday, August 79, 2004
Maybe love is the drug.
Dr. Gordon Gallup says semen has a reliable shot at bolstering
a woman's spirits, although don't expect to find
it in pill form at the neighbourhood pharmacy any time soon.
A study by the psychology professor at State University
of New York in Albany suggests that women who enjoy lovemaking
with partners who don't use condoms are less depressed
than women whose partners do.
The results, which appear this month in a Cambridge University
journal called Archives of Sexual Behavior, indicate
that postcoital bliss is triggered by a chemical in semen
that affects the mood-altering chemistry of the brain.
Traces of the semen compounds turn up in the bloodstream
within an hour or two of intercourse. (The research didn't
explore anal or oral transmission.)
"I'm not saying that semen plays the only role
in depression, but based on the results of the study, I'm
convinced it plays a part, " Dr. Gallup says.
He recruited 293 volunteers -- college women 18 to 35 years
old -- and later replicated the study among 700 other women,
though those results have yet to be published. The results
-- women with semen in their reproductive tract felt happier
than women without -- were similar in both studies.
Does this explain the dreamy smile and relaxed demeanour
a woman has after sex? Dr. Gallup emphatically says yes.
Interestingly, the results are the same for women who use
condoms as for those who abstain from sex. In other words,
it's not the sex that matters but what's left behind.
The study asked women questions about frequency of sex,
oral contraceptives, the type of relationship they were
in, the relationship's duration and its intensity.
Participants also answered 20 questions on the Beck Depression
Inventory, the standard test used by psychiatrists, to
measure their level of depression.
Researchers discovered that women whose partners never
used condoms scored an eight on average, those who sometimes
used them scored 10.5, those who usually used them scored
15 and those who always used them scored 11.3. (The discrepancy
is explained as a sampling error not duplicated in the second,
larger study.) Women who weren't having sex at all
scored 13.5. People who score over 17 are considered to
be moderately depressed.
Among the other findings:
Women who shun condoms become more depressed when their
relationship ends, "which is consistent with the
idea that semen is producing an antidepressant effect, "
Dr. Gallup says. "You would expect withdrawal symptoms."
Difficulty concentrating, one of the main symptoms of
depression, agitation and irritability increased with
condom use, as did attempts at suicide.
Women who snub the condom have fewer premenstrual symptoms.
Women who use condoms take longer to move into a new sexual
relationship, while women whose partners go bare become
involved more quickly. Dr. Gallup calls this "the
rebound effect."
While a hit of semen may make women feel as though they have
been taking antidepressants, the stuff might also behave
in the body a little bit like heroin. The more a woman gets,
the more she wants. "It's a chemical dependency
-- or there's some kind of psychological dependency
that's being driven by the presence of semen."
Dr. Gallup decided to study whether semen has an impact
on mood after encountering research suggesting that heterosexual
women who live together often have their periods at the
same time but lesbians do not. Menstrual synchronicity
is thought be caused by pheromones.
Since the olfactory response should be the same among all
women, he wondered whether semen was the wild card. "It
occurred to me that one difference between cohabitating
lesbians and cohabitating heterosexuals is that lesbians
would be unlikely to have semen in the reproductive tract, "
he says. "Maybe there's something about the
chemistry of semen that affects female metabolism and
subsequent odour production."
He was also aware that in 1986, psychologist P. G. Ney documented
a depressed woman whose symptoms subsided after she had
sex.
Dr. Gallup doesn't have a clue how the chemicals in
semen might interact with the chemicals in the brain --
serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine -- that regulate
mood. Sophisticated studies manipulating the presence
of chemicals in semen would be required before anyone could
guess how it all works together.
"Semen is very complicated, " he notes, and
contains several mood-alterating hormones, including
testosterone, estrogen, follicle-stimulating hormone,
luteinizing hormone and prostaglandins.
Some of these are responsible for regulating ovulation,
leading Dr. Gallup to wonder if ovulation is triggered
by the presence of semen.
He will now try to further his findings by developing more
advanced psychological studies that might lead to determining
how exactly what makes up semen might affect mood.
"If semen has antidepressant properties, you would
predict that non-condom [using] females would be more
eager to have sex, " he says. "We're also
trying to figure out how women feel the day after sex depending
on condom use. And we're looking at depression from
country to country and how that relates to incidence of
condom use."
Dr. Gallup has already been criticized by some who say his
findings will encourage women to abandon safe-sex practices
in the pursuit of happiness while making it acceptable
for men to toss their rubbers in the trash.
"Nothing could be further from the truth, "
he says. "This is not a comment on the lack of desirability
of condom use. The psychological effects of semen certainly
aren't going to offset the negative aspects of practising
unsafe sex, catching a sexually transmitted disease or
becoming pregnant. We're not making recommendations
about condom use."
Neither is he trying to make a case that semen is the new Prozac,
he says.
So far, his is the first serious study on the topic of the
psychological effects of semen, so he is not surprised
such a provocative topic would elicit a critical response.
"Look, we aren't trying to make the case that
we have definitive data for antidepressant properties
of semen. We're simply saying, 'Hey, the evidence
suggests that this might be a possibility and there are
a variety of ways to begin to test that.' Skepticism
is healthy if it prompts people to go and do research of their
own."
Plapet @ your service.
|
