Do you suffer from PMS or PMDD?
It wants to help you is by:
– Making your menstruation a medical issue
– Providing you with a catchy acronym
– And handing you a drug prescription (for which you will need to pay monthly for years)
PMS has been labeled, medicated, and joked about for decades.
Now, anohter relative is featured in the family of diseases: PMDD (Pre Menstrual dysphoric Disorder)
What is PMDD?
It’s PMS only more so!
PMDD is defined as Severe PMS
How do you know if your symptoms are severe?
If they disrupt your life…
Indeed, Menstruation ‘disrupts’ your life.
Yet its ‘disturbance’ has a message –
wouldn’t you rather stop to listen to what it has to say?
A new study from the Psychiatry Journal of the American Medical Association would rather you didn’t.
It analyzes the symptoms related to PMDD and highlights treatment options.
The symptoms associated with PMDD are
Irritability, sadness, and feeling overwhelmed.
Labeled severe symptoms, they elevate your diagnosis from mere PMS to PMDD
If your body is yearning to rest,
and you are so exhausted you can’t think straight –
wouldn’t you become irritable, sad, overwhelmed
if you were prevented from resting?
Instead of slowing down, resting, renewing, and receiving help from your family,
the treatment options suggested by the American Medical Association are medications.
Nothing new:
Prozac, Paxil, Contraceptive pills, only given for shorter periods of the month.
Their known side effects haven’t changed:
– Headache
– Nausea
– Insomnia
– Decreased sex drive
In over 25 years of working with women
who have suffered debilitating menstrual symptoms,
I have been humbled to find, again and again,
how addressing emotional components — elevates symptoms and dissolves completely
The emotions trapped in us when we get our first period –
uninformed, unsupported, shamed, or ridiculed,
give rise to years of symptoms
Our negative adolescence experience teaches us
to ignore our body,
medicate it,
and keep pushing on…
