Louann Brizendine, psychiatrist and author of the much-hyped The Female Brain, admits in the most recent issue of the New York Times Magazine that she’s not a fan of placebo-controlled studies.
Deborah Solomon: Although your book draws heavily on other scientists’ research, you don’t do any clinical research yourself. Isn’t that a drawback?
Dr. Brizendine: I don’t like doing clinical research because of placebos. In a “double-blind placebo-controlled study,” as they are called, neither the doctor nor the patient knows what the patient is taking. I don’t want to give patients a placebo. It’s cruel.
Hmmm. Sounds like someone does not accept standard scientific methods. And the journal Nature has discredited her book. I wonder if we should really take her seriously.
Oh, guess not. Turns out, Brizendine is not a fan of fact-checking either. She culled the statistic that women use 20,000 words a day, while men use about 7,000 — the bedrock of her thesis — from self-help guru Allan Pease, author of such classics as Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes, Why Men Lie and Women Cry, and Why Men Can Only Do One Thing at a Time and Women Never Stop Talking.
But Brizendine is a fan of Zoloft, so much so that you wonder if she got paid for product placement. A quick scan turns up at least seven mentions of the brand name, as a cure for cases such as Shana, who presented symptoms of depression as early as age 10. But consider these symptoms: Shana “started sleeping till noon on weekends,” “waited till the last minute to finish big projects, and she liked to stay up watching television.” Her female hormones soon surged to such heights that she talked back to her mother, saying, “I am going to the beach tomorrow and there’s nothing you can do about it,” and “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” (Read more insults/symptoms on page 44). Her mother slapped her, but came to her senses and sought help from a psychiatrist, the one and only Louann Brizendine.
Dr. Brizendine writes:
Fifty years ago, one successful treatment for PMDD was removing the ovaries surgically. At the time, this was the only way to remove the hormone fluctuation. Instead of removing Shana’s ovaries [emphasis mine], I gave her a hormone to take every day — the continuous birth control pill — to keep her estrogen and progesterone at moderately high but constant levels and prevent her ovaries from sending out the big fluctuations of hormones that were upsetting her brain. With her estrogen and progesterone at constant levels, her brain was kept calmer and her serotonin levels stabilized. For some girls I add a medication such as Zoloft — a so-called SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) — which can further stabilize and improve the brain’s serotonin level, in other words, improve one’s mood and sense of well-being. The following month her teacher called me to report that Shana was back to her good old self again — cheerful and getting good grades.
How creepy. Shana better be happy. Or else the doctor would take out her uterus.
— April Rabkin
