'I spent years in psychiatric hospitals until doctors discovered the real cause of my symptoms.'

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After forty-three years, my ovaries and I are parting ways. It's been a tumultuous relationship. As I reflect on our time together, the inescapable fact is that had women's health been taken seriously even a decade ago, I might have enjoyed my thirties, rather than being in and out of psychiatric hospitals.

Back in August 2016, I appeared on a panel discussion at the Melbourne Writers Festival. My third Young Adult novel had been published earlier in the year and my previous one had just won a series of prestigious awards. I was on a career high, but I wasn't emotionally present during the sold-out panel discussion.

I was involved — answering questions and saying the right words — but inside I was thinking about suicide. After the panel, I went straight back to my hotel room, curled up on the bed and waited for the dark feeling to pass.

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The following day, I felt completely normal again.

The violent mood swings had started a few months earlier.

Up until then, I had been living my dream. I had a beautiful, supportive husband and two little boys, a house on the coast and a room of my own to write in. Yes, I had experienced severe postnatal depression after both my babies were born, but I had been in the clear for four years. I thought the battles with mental illness were past me, until one June morning when I was travelling to a high school for an author visit and everything changed.

As I drove along the highway, singing along to my playlist, a tight sensation gripped my chest and I started to sweat. My heartbeat accelerated.

Strangely, the panicking sensation wasn't accompanied by racing thoughts, but by a plummeting darkness, as if all the light was rapidly sucked out of the world. Somehow, I made it to the school and gave two back-to-back writing workshops while my nervous system galloped along. A few hours later, the panic and darkness ended as suddenly as it started.

Over the following months, variations of the same thing kept happening. Sometimes the panic and dark mood would start and stop each day at almost the exact same time. Sometimes I'd be fine for five days only to be gripped seemingly at random by terror for the next fourteen. Weird physiological symptoms appeared: hot sweats, chills, dizziness, tingling in my forearms, itchy hands. I tried to carry on as best I could.

At home with my sons, I would hide in the laundry if I couldn't stop crying or buy myself ten minutes of tears in the bathroom while they ate lunch. We even managed a long-awaited overseas holiday, where I almost marvelled at my ability to feel crippling depression in cities I had always dreamed of visiting.

By December, things had become so bad that I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks.

The psychiatrist assigned to me, let's call him Dr N, was open in his bafflement. He asked me about my creative output and suggested my writing patterns were mania, likewise, my recent enthusiasm for houseplants. Dr N also wondered whether the contentment I had been feeling up until that day in June was actually a high. I disagreed, but after several months with no clear answers, he diagnosed me with bipolar disorder and the medication experiments began.

When I showed no improvement, he suggested I had Multiple Sclerosis. Or a brain tumour. Scans showed nothing. I logged my moods and my menstrual cycle. However, Dr N felt the pattern was too chaotic to be relevant.

I don't recall him, or any of the other psychiatrists I saw at the time ever suggesting I see a gynaecologist. After almost two years in and out of hospital with no relief Dr N agreed to let me try a particularly potent antidepressant. If it didn't work, he'd try electro convulsive therapy.

Incredibly, the new meds worked.

Although I returned to what I thought of as Normal Programming, the fear that it could all happen again didn't leave me; if I wrote more than a thousand words, I worried that I was having a manic episode. I accepted the bipolar label because I wanted an answer, but it never rang true. I continued to swim through a haze of bipolar-specific medications because now that I was stable, I was too afraid to stop.

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In 2023, the mood fluctuations — absent for so long — started again. This time, however, the zeitgeist was different, and after seeing Mia Freedman's posts about perimenopause, I began to log every mood shift and strange symptom against my cycle.

My GP referred me to a female doctor at the same practice, who sent me straight to a gynaecologist at the forefront of women's health research. After listening to my story and looking over my mood logs she diagnosed me with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder and attributed the return of symptoms to perimenopausal havoc. I started a treatment to stop ovulation, combined with HRT to provide a hormonal steady state. The treatment is not without lamentable side effects, but I am mentally well. I even have a new and supportive psychiatrist. It feels like a miracle, admittedly one that I could have done with a little earlier.

Thankfully, I've had my children and the removal of my ovaries is a reliable, permanent solution. I'm also grateful that I don't have daughters who might have inherited these faulty genes.

My biggest regret is not thinking to see a gynaecologist back in 2016. Sometimes I still feel that it was all my fault. However, the shift in attitude towards women's health seems positive.

A time might come when women with similar experiences to mine won't be treated as strange or baffling. For too long we have paid the price for narrow-minded medical misogyny: dismissed, locked away, or over medicated. I can only hope that the sharing of experiences like mine will help turn the tide.

Feature Image: Supplied.