Mood of the month

Up here on the blogosphere, where ordinary people gets to express their personal thoughts and day-to-day diatribe, much has been said about PMS, and therefore perhaps one could be excused for assuming that an irate woman is behaving as such only because she’s about to have her period.

So, in the interests of dispelling this myth – or, perhaps to confirm it – I’ve done a 5-minute research effort (predictably, Wikipedia is a primary source) to uncover its truths.

Before starting, I’ll point out that I’ve never made a mention of having PMS on my blog, largely because I don’t believe I suffer from it. I’ve even looked back through my blog posts over a one-year ahem, period, to see if I could identify any correlation between my apparent mood when writing vs my menstrual cycle, and I can confidently say I haven’t found one. Sure, some months the pre-menstrual discomfort is greater than others, but I can’t honestly recall a time when this might have put me in a bad mood – I do believe I become more scatter-brained than usual at this time, and if I’m ever irritated about anything around my period, it would have to be this aspect – but again, irritated not irate. And irritated with myself, not anyone else. Discomfort, not unbelievably crippling pain.

So, what do the experts say?

Apparently, somewhere between 70% and 95% of women suffer from some PMS symptoms (that’s not a particularly helpful statistic. Either 1 in 4 or 1 in 20 don’t suffer any symptoms at all…), and to varying degrees. The level of discomfort can vary from month to month (the article doesn’t say why), and the most commonly reported symptoms include:
Weight gain from premenstrual water retention
Abdominal bloating
Breast tenderness
Stress or anxiety
Depression
Crying spells
Mood swings, irritability or anger
Appetite changes and food cravings
Trouble falling asleep (insomnia)
Joint or muscle pain
Headache
Fatigue (medical)
Acne
Trouble concentrating
Social withdrawal
Body temperature increase
Worsening of existing skin disorders, and respiratory (eg, allergies, infection) or eye (eg, visual disturbances, conjunctivitis) problems
Out of the 17 symptoms listed here, I experience seemingly random combinations of between 2 and 5 each month.

The Wiki entry goes on to report that 14% of women between the ages of 20 and 35 have such debilitating PMS that they have to miss work on some days, and that an unfortunate further few suffer from even more exacerbated symptoms, and this condition is considered to be distinct from PMS, labelled ‘premenstrual dysphoric disorder’ (PMDD).

The most interesting thing the entry points out is that “there is no laboratory test or unique physical findings to verify the diagnosis of PMS”, and that “a number of medical conditions are subject to exacerbation at menstruation, a process called menstrual magnification. These conditions may lead the patient to believe that she may have PMS, when the underlying disorder may be some other problem”.

Perhaps this is the reason for the discrepancy of the figures provided above – i.e. about 4 in 20 people believe they are suffering from PMS when it is actually masking some other potentially serious condition, such as depression, migraines, seizure disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, stress and asthma.

There is also a school of thought that believes PMS is a socially constructed disorder, a product of a ‘hypochondriatic culture’ – a view that actually cannot be refuted scientifically because of the vast lack of study of the syndrome.

This last fact, coupled with the poor diagnosis of PMS versus other conditions, alarms me because it has, in my mind, only negative consequences:

- Women who are suffering immense pain for around one solid month of the year may have had no cause to suffer, as their symptoms have been casually labelled by the blanket term ‘PMS’ when other treatable conditions are the cause of majority of their pain. This in turn affects their productivity in the workplace, and perhaps contributes to a perception by some that women are weaker/less ambitious than their male counterparts, because they have to take a day or two off work every month to cope with their symptoms

- The lack of scientific diagnosis leads to a social misunderstanding, one that indiscriminately labels all female unpleasantness as ‘PMS’ which is belittling because women have as many rational menstrually-unrelated reasons to get pissed off from time to time as men do (and of course no lesser tendency to display irrational anger from time to time), without their anger being dismissed for existing only because ‘it’s that time of the month’.

The point of this little piece? None really – I guess I’m just expressing my gratitude at not having to deal with the severe monthly trauma that people like Peas have to – from my side, I hail the coming of my period as a fantastic confirmation that I have not accidentally fallen pregnant. Until, of course, the day I perhaps decide I do wish to fall pregnant, in which case the onset of a period will potentially cause me far more anxiety than any period pain ever did.