Beauty and the Breast

That is not a typo -- that is the name of new blog that focuses on safety issues surrounding breast implants. We've blogged about breast implants before, both here and here, but now there is a study that shows that found the long-term risk of suicide tripled for women who have undergone cosmetic breast implant surgery. actually, this is the sixth or seventh study with the same findings, and the conclusion has always been the same: Those women who killed themselves must have started out a little crazy. But in a post entitled, Breast Implants and Suicide: It’s Not All the Women’s Fault, bloggers Sybil and Mary make a compelling argument that it was complications arising from their breast implants caused emotional distress so profound that it led them to extreme actions:

"Consider PJ Brent, a woman I worked with and whom I admired deeply. She experienced awful pain and disfigurement from her implants, and was diagnosed with autoimmune disease. Even worse, her children were affected by the silicone, which, I think, caused incredible guilt. She had breastfed, and her daughters later experienced problems similar to hers. If PJ wasn’t emotionally unstable before she received her implants, she certainly had cause to be after. She ultimately took her own life.

Here’s the tragedy: There are countless women suffering from their implants like PJ suffered. The fact is, women with implants are very, very likely to experience major complications. According to the FDA Breast Implant Consumer Handbook, 25 percent of women with saline or silicone implants have complications severe enough for them to undergo re-operation within five years of getting them, and about half of all implants rupture within 10 years, also requiring surgery. Significant numbers of women with implants have reported problems ranging from severe weight gain to impeded ability to breastfeed to autoimmune disease to cancer. In many cases, the illnesses are chronic and debilitating, taking a heavy financial and emotional toll as the women struggle to pay for treatment and their families fall apart from the stress.

So why, in all the coverage of the Swedish study I’ve seen - such as here, here and here - not one item or article asks how those poor women were suffering at time of death? Why does the media, without exception, declare those women flawed from the beginning instead of looking at and asking questions about how they got that way? Because if, from all the pain caused by their implants, there are women who seek relief through killing themselves, no one should be surprised."

To read the rest of their post and visit their blog, click here.