DELANO, Calif. (AP) — “That ‘70s Show” actor Danny Masterson has been sent to a California state prison to serve his sentence for two rape convictions.
Authorities said Wednesday that the 47-year-old Masterson has been admitted to North Kern State Prison, and they released his first prison mug shot. The photo shows him wearing orange prison attire, with long hair and a beard.
“Just hormones.”
Anyone who has ever seen someone on hormonal medication knows that it can profoundly change your outlook and personality. Even birth control can have emotional impacts on people, and they may not even notice it because the medication is so normalized that people don’t see it as a potential problem.
I edited that bit cos I knew someone would think that was my entire point. But as you said yourself “it CAN have” (emphasis mine) undesirable effects. Most medications, hormonal or not, CAN have these effects. But the vast majority of people on these medications don’t get these effects. And even if every person who was chemically castrated suffered these effects (and again, they don’t, we wouldn’t use it to treat some diseases if it did), the fact it’s reversible makes it infinitely better than the death penalty. Reality isn’t perfect. There’s always gonna be compromises.
My observation is that it seems like a significant percentage of people do experience the side effects, but either don’t connect the dots to the medication, or the benefit outweighs the problem. A quick google search has revealed that this is an issue that is getting increased attention over the last few years.
“The study of over a million Danish women over age 14, using hard data like diagnosis codes and prescription records, strongly suggests that there is an increased risk of depression associated with all types of hormonal contraception.
…the IUD was particularly associated with depression in all age groups is especially significant, because traditionally, physicians have been taught that the IUD only acts locally and has no effects on the rest of the body. Clearly, this is not accurate.”
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/can-hormonal-birth-control-trigger-depression-201610172517
“Among contraceptive users aged 15–49 in 2018, female permanent contraception was the most common method used (28%), followed by pills (21%), male condoms and IUDs (both 13%).”
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-method-use-united-states
I’ve been having a little trouble finding out how many women specifically in that range are sexually active, but I found a few articles that seem to show that the numbers for men and women are around 70% - 75%. For the sake of this post, I’m going to call it 72%.
I looked up the census data for 2018, which showed that there were 164,730,000 women living in the US at that time. 72% are likely to be sexually active, so that makes 118,605,600. Because I can’t be sure if they differentiated copper IUD’s from hormonal, we’ll just look at pills. 21% equals 24,907,176. About 2% of women in the Dutch study said they experienced depression from the pills, so that gives us 498,143.52—nearly half a million—women who are likely to be experiencing depression from pill form birth control alone. This number obviously increases when you include the other forms of hormonal birth control that I couldn’t calculate here, plus all the other forms of hormonal medication.
Not sure why you’ve posted all of this given I’ve not once mentioned hormonal contraceptives and there’s not much data here to support your claim… 2% is an incredibly low number. Sure, when you have such a large population it involves a lot of people, but statistically, it’s stupid low. You’ve also misinterpreted the data given a bit, the risk of depression when on a hormonal contraceptives was 2.2%. The risk of depression when not on one is 1.7%. Again, that affects a lot of people, but it’s not the number you’ve calculated being caused by the contraceptive alone, and is still statistically very low. So, I’m just gonna completely ignore your anecdotal observations given at the start of your comment and rely on the hard data you’ve given. Which, admittedly, is only for one branch of hormonal medicine, but the data given does neatly support my claim that most people don’t experience these wild side effects you initially ascribed to the treatments.
