Mental Health Report

Semen acts as an anti-depressant

Gordon Gallup, State University of New York
Archives of Sexual Behavior
Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Semen makes you happy. That's the remarkable conclusion of a study comparing women whose partners wear condoms with those whose partners don't.

The study, which is bound to provoke controversy, showed that the women who were directly exposed to semen were less depressed. The researchers think this is because mood-altering hormones in semen are absorbed through the vagina. They say they have ruled out other explanations.

"I want to make it clear that we are not advocating that people abstain from using condoms," says Gordon Gallup, the psychologist at the State University of New York who led the team. "Clearly an unwanted pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease would more than offset any advantageous psychological effects of semen."

Suicide attempts

His team divided 293 female students into groups depending on how often their partners wore condoms, and assessed their happiness using the Beck Depression Inventory, a standard questionnaire for assessing mood. People who score over 17 are considered moderately depressed.

The team found that women whose partners never used condoms scored 8 on average, those who sometimes used them scored 10.5, those who usually used them scored 15 and those who always used them scored 11.3. Women who weren't having sex at all scored 13.5.




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SAN FRANCISCO
Golden Gate Bridge suicide film draws crowd at festival
Ruthe Stein, Chronicle Senior Movie Writer
Monday, May 1, 2006

Sunday was a glorious shirt-sleeve spring day, not weather conducive to thinking about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

But more than 700 locals spent the afternoon in the dark at the San Francisco International Film Festival's screening of "The Bridge,'' Eric Steel's controversial documentary in which he captures six suicides from the golden magnet for troubled souls.