Hormone therapy

”In the 1930s . . . psychiatrists began enthusiastically trying out hormone treatment for women patient with mental illness. Psychiatrists believed that it was obvious that since women experienced mental illness and appeared to have stresses around their life transitions . . . that hormone disruptions were the cause and that administration of hormones was the treatment of choice. . . . psychiatrists were particularly enthusiastic about treatment of a specific disorder: involutional melancholia . . . In the psychiatric model of illness around the climacteric, mental illness was due to a decline in hormones, esp. estrogen, and the treatment was hormone replacement. The diagnosis of involutional melancholia died in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the rise of the diagnosis of major depressive disorder. . . . In 1940, NY psychiatrist Herbert Ripley and endocrinologist Ephraim Short collaborated with pathologist George Papanicolaou on the treatment of involutional melancholia with estrogen.” (Hirshbein III, 164, 65)