204 - Hormonal changes and mental health: maternal mental health awareness

The Dr Louise Newson Podcast

Dr Louise Newson

Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Medicine

4.8 • 798 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Advisory: this podcast contains themes of mental health and suicide. Earlier this month Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week was marked across the UK. In this week’s episode Emma Hammond, an employment lawyer specialising in advising women who have experienced discrimination due to the menopause, generously shares her own story. After a traumatic birth with her first child, Emma developed serious symptoms, including psychosis and not sleeping or eating, that ultimately led to medication and hospitalisation. While she wanted a second child, her periods stopped and she was told she was perimenopausal – but an unexpected development took place soon after she was admitted to a mental health hospital. Here she and Dr Louise talk about the powerful role of hormones in women during pregnancy, birth and perimenopause, and how hormones can be overlooked by healthcare professionals caring for women struggling with their mental health. This podcast follows an earlier episode with Emma where she talked about her career, and offered advice on menopause in the workplace. Emma’s three tips: See your GP promptly if you are struggling with your mental health and don’t think you can fix everything yourself Be honest and open with your family and friends about what you are going through so that they can support you Think about life changes and holistic approaches as well as hormonal treatments or medication. Read more about Emma here. Contact the Samaritans for 24-hour, confidential support by calling 116 123.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Dr. Louise Newsome and welcome to my podcast. I'm a GP and menopause specialist and I run the Newsome Health Menopause and Wellbeing Centre here in Stratford-Bron-Avon. I'm also the founder of the Menopause charity and the Menopause support app called Balance.
0:29.9	On the podcast, I will be joined each week by an exciting guest to help provide evidence-based
0:36.5	information and advice about both the perimenopause and the
0:40.9	menopause. So today on the podcast, I've got somebody who's already been on the podcast.
0:49.7	So this is her number two experience and she's called Emma Hammond and she's a lawyer who's doing some incredible work on helping women in the workplace who are menopausal, which hopefully many of you have already listened to.
1:03.7	So today, she's been very kind and generous with her time to talk about her own experience actually and what really has empowered her to do
1:12.4	the work that she's doing and most of us learn from our experiences. I wouldn't be doing the
1:17.3	work that I'm doing if I hadn't had such a bad perimenopause and realise the injustice
1:21.0	and suffering to women. So Emma, thank you so much for your time today. That's a pleasure, Louise.
1:26.2	Thanks for having me. So tell me a bit about you and what happened if you don't mind.
1:31.0	Of course. I've been working as an employment life for 25 years now.
1:34.6	And my interest in mental health within the employment law arena really kind of came to the head following my own personal experience.
1:42.5	And that was linked back to a very traumatic birth of my first child when I was 36.
1:50.3	And it's interesting, isn't it?
1:51.4	Because when things happen to you, often you look back and you start to put pieces of
1:56.3	the jigsaw together.
1:57.9	And that's very much what happened to me.
1:59.5	I've always been a coper, an optimist,
2:02.7	always sort of really prided myself on being very resilient and dealing with the challenges
2:09.3	that have been thrown at me through, whether that's work, personal life, etc. But when I had my
2:15.4	son, I thought that the symptoms that I was experiencing, which were actually psychosis, were simply baby blues, lack of sleep, that kind of thing.
2:26.3	And I have a very graphic image that still stays with me that I didn't talk to anybody about because I thought it was normal, which was that my son was
	...

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