Could Psychedelics Bring Back Lost Periods? Personal Stories and Beyond
Written by Martha Allitt
Despite the huge surge in psychedelic studies to come out in the past decade, we still know very little about how they affect or may be affected by the menstrual cycle.
However, as more and more people experiment with psychedelic substances and these therapies move closer to clinical application, understanding this interaction is a growing necessity. Based on a growing plethora of personal anecdotes, it's clear that a woman's menstrual cycle can significantly impact their psychedelic experience. Conversely, psychedelics themselves may affect aspects of someone's cycle.
Yet, with a significant lack of research findings, biologists and mental health researchers are still figuring out just how exactly it is these things interact. Supporting this theory, several personal stories, including my own, have described cases of “periods returning” following psychedelics.
After a diagnosis of Anorexia in my early teens, I experienced amenorrhea.
Although I'd largely recovered from the condition by age 18, restoring weight and overcoming the psychological impact, my periods never quite returned, besides the very occasional and sporadic light bleed. Attending my first psychedelic ceremony at the age of 21, I, perhaps for the first time, truly recognized the importance of my periods and how they symbolised my role as a woman. In this recognition, I spent a large part of the ceremony in floods of tears, mourning the loss of my periods but also, with hope, vowing to myself it was my duty to get them back.
Exactly one month later, low and behold, I had a full period for the first time in years, and the cycle continued regularly from that point onwards. I've since discovered I'm certainly not alone in having experienced such a phenomenon. Rather, since the 1950s, researchers have come across cases of women spontaneously bleeding, or whose amenorrhea had been reversed following psychedelics.
Interestingly, this occurrence hasn't been limited to one type of psychedelic either.
Whereas I'd taken peyote, a phenylethylamine compound, other women have experienced unexpected bleeding following LSD or psilocybin, which are tryptamine compounds. Although these compounds do have shared mechanisms, differences in the way they interact with the nervous system make me question whether their capacity to induce menstruation could be explained by more than just a biological effect on hormones.
Psychologically, the effect of psychedelics in decreasing stress and anxiety could play a role, since both factors have been associated with the onset of oligomenorrhea and amenorrhea. And psycho-spiritually, something even more subjective could be at play. In indigenous plant-medicine using traditions, purging is very much seen as part of the psychedelic healing process, as it allows someone to release negative and stuck energies. In this way, the bleeding could be valued as part of the purging healing process.
As one facilitator explained: "In the same way that iboga or ayahuasca may cause you to throw up, menstruation can also be a way of "purging" the body…Many of the indigenous systems that work with master plants involve deep purification rituals, and the period is considered in many of these traditions a part of purification.”
It’s not just full doses of psychedelics that seem to impact menstruation.
Rather, multiple online reports have described cases in which microdosing – regularly using small, sub-perceptual of psychedelic substances – has influenced someone’s menstrual cycle timings. In a case report published last year, the authors described a woman who had a long history of irregular cycles and a diagnosis of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Soon after her PCOS diagnosis, she began microdosing and reported having regular cycles.
Another microdoser on Reddit also described how their amenorrhea had been reversed since they began microdosing. However, on the same thread, another user reported having begun microdosing and subsequently missing their period. With microdosing research in its early stages, we know very little about how the accumulation of these small psychedelic doses work biologically. As such, there’s very little scientific information to suggest if and how they may be influencing reproductive hormones and menstruation. Nonetheless, a research finding from the Beckley Foundation suggested microdosing may have similar mechanisms to full doses. In their study, small doses of LSD increased brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a molecule produced by 5-HT2A activation, in healthy volunteers. As such, there may be an overlap in how long-term microdosing effects and acute psychedelic effects interact with hormones.
Similar to full doses, self-reports also describe how microdosing can help decrease stress and anxiety.
As such, microdosing may help reduce the impact of these psychological factors, and stress hormones on the menstrual cycle. As well as decreasing stress and anxiety, microdosing has also been found to alleviate low-energy and depression. For this reason, there’s reports of multiple people using microdosing as a tool to manage their symptoms of PMS and PMDD. “…in the monthly week before my cycle I was so surprised; normally I am a pain in the ass and sometimes feel really down and not myself. Now [after beginning microdosing] I actually felt quite relaxed and I was just happy and relaxed,” one woman described in an article for the Microdosing Institute.
At Hystelica, we hope to be able to build on the value of this personal data and that this knowledge, among our other research efforts, will start to unravel the unknowns about how these substances affect a woman's body and vice versa.