Posted: 18. May, 2011
Mouth implies a long list of capabilities: strength, vitality, mental sharpness, healthiness, resilience. But when you ask someone in her seventies or eighties what youth is, above all she will say that youth is a feeling.
“It’s a feeling you wake up with and go to sleep with,” one woman in her midseventies explained to me. “And you can’t say exactly what it is until it isn’t there any more.”
Happily, the Youth-extending tools that are available to us today go a very long way, both directly and indirectly, chemically and psychologically, in promoting that quintessential youthful feeling, one variously described to me as “hopefulness,” “feeling full of life,” “happy,” “peppy,” and—a word that I hear with surprising frequency—”sexy.”
“Sure, sexy,” one woman in her late sixties told me. “When you are young, you go through each day looking at the men who pass your way through special eyes—the eyes of a woman who enjoys a man’s manliness. And when you no longer examine the goods that way, you know you are over the hill. All the rest of the bad feelings that come with advanced age—the depression, the hopelessness—follow from that one.”
Although this woman may be overstating the case a bit, there is no doubt in my mind that age-associated depression is often intimately connected to a waning libido and/or sexual dysfunction, such as impotence. This connection is both psychological and biochemical. For start¬ers, a sexually alive and active person feels good about himself because he still has the fundamental passion and power of youth. And the biochemical fact is that those same major hormone supplements that can potentially revitalize sexual feelings—DHEA, testosterone, and estrogen—also have been shown to reverse age-associated depression on their own, when used properly.
The connection between libido and general mood is particularly relevant during what we call early middle age, our forties and fifties. I can vouch for this from all the nervous gags about “down time” that I hear at my over-thirty basketball games.
If You Really Want To Get Depressed, Take An Antidepressant
These days, middle-aged men and women with sagging energy, spirits, and self-esteem are routinely diagnosed with low-grade depression and put on one of the new menu of antidepressants with few side effects like Prozac, Desipramine, and Zoloft. Unfortunately, one side effect that remains in a significant number of cases is sexual dysfunction in the form of radically reduced libido, an inability to reach orgasm, or impotence. Hey, but at least you’re not depressed, right?
Wrong. A woman with a sagging libido is a woman who feels her best days are behind her. And a man who cannot get an erection is undoubtedly a seriously depressed man.
To my mind, any doctor faced with a depressed middle-aged patient should prescribe moderate exercise, as well as take assays of that person’s DHEA, testosterone, and/or estrogen to determine if they are present in youthful amounts before even thinking of prescribing an antidepressant. Not only can exercise, as well as replenishing these hormones to youthful levels directly enhance mood, they can indirectly do the job by increasing sexual desire and sexual energy, quite the opposite from the effects of a “legitimate” antidepressant.
Related Posts:
Add your comment