PMDD

[IcakethereforeIam]

Article in the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/16/my-self-worth-plummeted-every-month-the-hidden-disorder-that-can-ruin-womens-lives

I've never heard of this. At the risk of coming across as having a tunnel vision, the timing, the treatments....there seems to be a hellova potential overlap with girls who believe they have, are diagnosed with and treated for gender dysphoria instead.

Open access paper for anyone who wants to look at the original study: https://bmcpsychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12888-022-03851-0

I have PMDD, and also ADHD. I knew that anecdotally there seemed to be a link, and I've heard research that suggests it's partly because being neurodivergent means that it's fairly usual to be close to the edge of not coping and then the hormonal changes are just that little push that would cause someone else to stumble but shove you right over that edge.

I can see how for someone with gender dysphoria, it would be even more difficult to cope with, in the same way as large breasts that cause backache would be, but it doesn't, in and of itself, feel at all like gender dysphoria.

Frequencies of epilepsy seizures and periods are very much linked too. Dd once got over 100seizures one day and when her period started overnight, they stopped completely for a week.

That's Laura Becker, very famous detransitioner (often on detransitioner panels) quoted in the article!

Absolutely Op. The hatred I had for my body as a teen due to PMDD was immense. Between that and being GNC I truly think I would have gone down the trans route had that been available to me.

We need to be able to discuss and treat hormonal things more openly without it being seen as a weakness or a barrier to how we are treated; after going through different hrt regimes (and before I was) there was clearly some that have a huge influence on my mood and general view if the world and myself. And again coming off it.

I remember a decade ago that some of the women I knew in toddler groups were trying to work out if they did had pnd or if it was actually ppmd. One was going through assessments for Bi Polar disorder but kept noting that it was very linked to her cycle, something the drs seemed to be ignoring.

I never had any mood issues with periods till peri. it was horrible and I could always time my period to exactly 7 days after a particularly bad day.

I'm a bit confused by the fact that the article speaks of this as a condition of which we are only newly aware. In its original usage, wasn't the term PMT (pre-menstrual tension) originally coined to name this very severe condition? - before it was co-opted as a name for the much milder discomforts of almost all women's menstrual cycles?

Doctors decades ago, even in the depths of their disregard for women's health, were not entirely ignorant of this serious condition.

What exactly is new, other than the name? Perhaps the diagnosis has been refined slightly in a way that generates the need for a new term. But I feel slightly suspicious of all the ways in which that cultural tides push and pull on medical knowledge