Hrt and menopausal symptom control: mood changes


        HRT AND MENOPAUSAL SYMPTOM CONTROL: MOOD CHANGES
Many women feel they are changing personality during menopause, like the female equivalent of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Germaine Greer likens it to 'the person you know being stuffed inside a new one. The most unnerving, even terrifying, change is a sudden horrible propensity to blind rage . . . She finds herself calling down horrible vengeance and uttering mad threats, which seem to be throttled out of her, as if she was being squeezed in a giant hand. Sometimes the outburst is accompanied by a feeling of physical anxiety, amounting to pain, or a feeling of unbearable pressure in the head, or behind the eyes.' The choking rage is usually followed by 'exhaustion, helpless guilt and a futile wishing that whatever it was had not happened'.
The hormone replacement advocate Dr Robert A. Wilson (see chapter 2) linked the mood changes in his 'gentle, almost angelic mother' to his later efforts to find a 'treatment' for menopause. 'At the time I could not understand it. What was a boy in his teens to make of a phrase like "change of life"? . . . Yet something terrible was obviously happening. I was appalled at the transformation of the vital, wonderful woman who had been the dynamic focal point of our family into a pain-wracked, petulant individual. I could feel the deep wounds her senseless rages inflicted on my father, myself and the younger children. It was this frightful experience that later directed my interest as a physician to the problem of the menopause.'
*50\38\8*

Hormonal
«Generic Medications»