At some point after that, in my ongoing quest for peace of mind, I started thinking about my menstrual health as part of my mental health. I was aware of the shift in his gaze towards me in a way that I absolutely did not have the language for.

I was shocked to learn that , for many of these women, in that room with the psychologist was the first time they had disclosed past sexual, physical or emotional abuse.Either way, books like this are both objective and can be very subjective too so I was able to take both parts and apply them to my journey and get rich insights into the author's journey which I really appreciated.

Dr Nick Panay (Consultant gynaecologist and Chairman of the National Association for Premenstrual Syndrome (NAPS) . During this gruelling process, I learned more from the doctors and nurses about what actually happens during the menstrual cycle, how my ovaries and hormones work, than I think I ever had before in my life. with a generous dollop of humanity - Irish Times on Anxiety for Beginners You may also be interested in. It is with a mixture of humanity and clear-sightedness that she analyses genetic and environmental influences, trauma, hormones, fertility, parenthood, medication, social stigma and language, all the while linking back to her own stories and those of fellow sufferers. This book has literally allowed me to understand my menstral cycle and PMS more than anybody I know or any healthcare professional I have been in contact with.

The idea of Darwinian Feminism is brilliant, and I think Haselton should be applauded for this book! Still, too, it is often the case that the louder we shout about our pain, the more we are told that we’re causing trouble and the less likely we are to be taken seriously. In 2015 Neurologist, Suzanne O'Sullivan published a book titled " It's all in your head: True stories of Imaginary Illness' and account of her twenty years of experience helping to treat conditions that exist in the murk between physical and pyschological illness. But, to suggest that our evolutionary past (writ into our very DNA, and the molecules like hormones that DNA provides the templates for) can bias or even limit our behavior, can bring a strong (dare I say 'visceral') negative reaction from progressives. So many women shared the article with variations on ‘thank god someone is saying it’, and with details of how their own experiences had been diminished or stigmatised.

One of the problems being that from month to month a woman's premenstrual symptoms may vary in length or severity. Groundbreaking and counter-intuitive, HORMONAL will empower women everywhere to embrace their biology.I can appreciate the importance of what this author is trying to do in terms of demasking hormones and their effect on us, but I wound up largely underwhelmed by this book.

But for a stomach ache to have girls falling on their backs and puking into their pencil cases seemed wild. We are not reducing ourselves or undoing all the equality women have fought for by learning to embrace our messy selves. Our reproductive systems are designed to grow babies and constantly prepare for them–even if we don’t want them – and the hormonal fluctuations behind our reproductive processes mean that the workings of our inner world are often in collision with the outer world and all the expectations we perceive it to have of us. We non- starters used to ask each other how bad it could be, because we all knew what a stomach ache felt like. In her book she shows that there are no simple answers, but lots of fascinating possibilities, when we start to think about the biological aspects of our sexual lives.

It spent the majority of its pages discussing pregnancy, childbirth, and how every other hormone we experience in any other stage of life is directly related to pregnancy, childbirth, and finding a suitable mate to facilitate all these things. But, to her credit, she is willing to stake her academic career on an essentially Darwinian topic; in the introduction she says, "I want to argue for a new breed of feminism, a new Darwinian feminism". it highlights how we've always been made out to be liars + sheds light on women's long history of being accused of hysteria and being too sensitive (because of PMS) and then thrown into Asylums.