Self-Compassion versus the Patriarchal Pharmaceutical Industry
XY notes the importance of being compassionate with herself amid emotional changes during her menstrual cycle. She advocates for more research around menstruation and PMS treatments that don't negatively impact one's health in the way that some birth control methods do. She highlights that Big Pharma and the patriarchy shape research on menstruation, including whether there is research conducted at all.
Transcript
OBOS Today: How about your mental health? You mentioned that closer to your cycle, closer to certain parts of your cycle, that you do face depressive symptoms, how have you been managing that?
XY: That's a good question. I think what you mentioned earlier and this question kind of brings in the fact that women and people who menstruate are used to this societal norm and pressure that we have to solve our own problems and then solve other people’s problems. And I thought that that's something significant that I should point out. Um, and my answer is going to be related to -- I --what was the question again, sorry?
OBOS Today: No, I just wanted to know how you managed your possibly, tried to treat your mental health problems, that might have, that might have been a symptom of your cycle. But you did mention, you did make a good point, and you can kinda tie that into your answer.
XY: Yeah, so, talking about being self-imposing responsibility of our own health on ourselves— with mental health, I practice a lot of self-compassion. And that is something that I learned recently and lately that trying to resist and trying to tell myself that, "Oh, no I am better than that." I can't just toxic positivity my way through this phase. To really practice being kind to myself, to say, you know, this is a part of, a part of what having this body encompasses and that the thoughts will pass. And while it can be, the temptation, it can be really high to take action based on those emotions that I have— that [are] still gonna miss us in the long term. So, tying back that, to what I mentioned earlier about again, societal pressure, is that I figured this out on my own and this has been more than a decade ever since I started menstruating.
And, um, I also wanted to point out that per my reading I have also realized that a lot of science and medical research is being, for lack of a better word, corrupted by sponsorship, like when scientists or doctors do research, they need sponsorship to kind of have their funding, to do their research. And, because of how the system is set up for research, many, many scientists rather than replicating experiments so to ensure that they are valid, they just come up with appealing sentences and appealing sciences to push [the] pharmaceutical agenda. And how that links to my health challenge is that there is not a lot of studies done on menstruation, on cramps, on the menstruation cycle or the menstrual cycle and I wish more attention would have been paid to that.
I want to bring in this example of contraception methods. There are so many contraceptive methods that focused on prohibiting the women's body to ovulate and to prohibit our menstrual cycles, like natural menstrual cycles, that it's very strange because I remember, there was actually a male version of birth control that was being tested in India and they all reported symptoms of the same symptoms that women face when they take birth control pills. And, because of the patriarchy, globally, the birth control didn't get released, it didn't get launched, simply because men didn't want to take, or people who didn't menstruate didn't want to take birth control pills that affect their body function. And, thinking back about, and taking that and relating it with how medical research is done and also my own health challenge, it's just a lot of correlation that people don't realize. Women -- research on women's bodies are not done extensively, simply because of the profitability and the patriarchy that kind of prevents that from happening. And we need to, we need to advocate against that. We need to start advocating for our own bodies and our own stories...