I’m currently working on a reported personal essay about psychosis in menopause, which is forcing me to distill what I’ve learned so far into a form that I hope may be useful to others. I’m fucking enraged (but not surprised) that menopausal people are being prescribed antidepressants and other psych meds to little effect, when many might benefit from hormonal support. I’m furious that we are being psychiatrically incarcerated at twice the rate as middle aged men.
For a few years now, I’ve been on a deep dive into the intersection of mental health and reproductive hormones—living my experiences, researching in the obsessive way I do, talking to folks who’ve dedicated their lives to this work. I’m especially looking forward to interviewing Professor Jayashri Kulkarni, who has worked for decades in this area. Decades ago, she did intakes at an asylum. She talks about how so many people with uteruses told her how things went sideways for them after childbirth or during menopause. Because she listened and took them seriously, she became curious, and came to dedicate her life and research to this work.
Professor Kulkarni talks about how early childhood trauma survivors with CPTSD (it me!) are more likely to have difficulty with reproductive-related mental health issues throughout their lives. THIS IS THE THING I MOST WISH I HAD KNOWN. I keep uncovering more clues about how sensitive I have always been to hormonal fluctuations. I’d not fully grasp all these connections until this year.
Now that I look back, I see it all. How things went very haywire for me during puberty, how that distress got me locked up and psychiatrized for my entire adolescence.
I evened out somewhat in adulthood—except for the despair and suicidal thoughts in the week before my cycle. I only remember this because of the journals I kept in my twenties, and how I was making these hormonal connections even back then.
I couldn’t remember if I had been in any serious emotional distress after giving birth to my son. How strange is that? I mostly recall the sleeplessness—mine and his. The sweetness of his huge brown baby eyes looking into mine, as I rocked him and rocked him, his little mind alert as if carrying memories from another lifetime.
Yesterday I looked at some of the earliest entries in the blog I kept for the first five years of his life. Again, the distress was there on the page. I even used the words postpartum depression as shorthand to describe what I was feeling. Then it all came flooding back: how I started a new parents’ group when my baby was six weeks old, because I knew how much I needed it. I was drowning.
After nearly four years of the wildest, most disruptive perimenopause, I’ve started wearing this little estradiol patch on my lower abdomen. I obtained it, along with the progesterone pills, from one of the shitty startups that passes for healthcare in America, only because I can’t easily get it elsewhere right now. It’s been a little over two weeks now, and I’ve noticed that I am sleeping ever so slightly better.
I know there is no one size fits all when it comes to anything with these bodyminds. But it’s hard not to get my hopes up after hearing so many stories of how hormone therapy has made a difference for menopausal people in mental distress, in some cases after they’d been labeled and drugged for years for challenges surfacing or intensifying in midlife. They say it can take two to three months to feel the effects. We will see how we get on, more estrogen and me.
I’m absurdly excited about this work on mental health and hormones, how I get to encourage other sensitive trauma survivors to be aware and take care, especially at key reproductive transitions. When we know this about ourselves, we can try to access some quality hormonal support if we need it and if it is safe for us. It’s just damn hard to access, which has everything to do with the fact that hormones are inexpensive and aren’t going to make money for drug companies. But that’s another post.