Dare you ask what?
Yes, I suffer from PMDD. I have tried cognitive behaviour therapy, a range of anti-depressants, diet changes, birth control, sedatives and at extremes, locking myself away from people if I can identify in time that I’m reaching that portion of my cycle.
The problem with antidepressants is that to be effective you need to be taking them all the time, you can’t just start and stop as your cycle goes around. And I develop tolerances to them very quickly. So they only work for a few months before I have to increase the dosage, which has other side effects as it goes up. Benzodiazepines work GREAT - as long as I’m constantly taking them from the onset of symptoms to the time they pass, which can be anywhere from two days to a week. And doctors in these parts don’t like handing out benzos for that sort of situation, plus the whole “Walking around in a drugged-out haze” isn’t much better career-wise than the simmering rage is. Diet changes only make so much difference, and I’ve never been one of the people who gets endorphins and joy from hard exercise, I just end up feeling sweaty and out of sorts and more put-upon.
I currently have a birth control implant that gives 3 years of birth control. It has the side effect of stopping my period entirely for the first 12-16 months of that 3 year cycle. That slightly flattens the peaks and troughs of the hormonal fluctuations, but doesn’t cease them entirely. But without the physical signs of a period approaching, it makes it even harder to establish if what I’m feeling is a justified response to a stimulus, or a massive overreaction. If I’m under any other sort of emotional stress at the time (which I am at the moment, currently going through a protracted divorce, still living with my ex husband in a house that’s in a state you’d see on hoarders, trapped in a job I hate by crushing levels of debt I incurred whilst my ex was critically ill and I was nursing him in addition to working full time), it can very easily get away from me and get to the point where I do snap. And it’s not just at my (ex) husband. It can be anyone at any time, for any reason.
I have walked out in tears on an Assistant Director of our department - a guy second only to our Ministerial Director, the head of our whole department - because in the “discussion” we got into, he told me that our team HAD been consulted in the consultancy period of a proposed system upgrade that fell into a complete hash, and that we had “chosen” not to respond to the consultancy request. In my mind I felt he was attacking me and the work I did to try and support my team - despite that I wasn’t even in the team at the time that it all had happened, because I’d been seconded to another department entirely. But I’d become wrapped up and emotionally invested in this system situation, and all I could see when he was telling me this is that I had fucked up, and that we deserved what was happening to us because we refused to engage in the consultancy procedure.
And in my mind it was walk out in tears of frustration, or tell him exactly how far up his own arse his fat fucking head was, because he sat in Canberra jerking off all day and didn’t have the first fucking clue about what we did at the state level, as was adequately displayed by the fact that every time we turned around, he was issuing more proclamations about how we SHOULD do our job without actually looking at HOW we had to do our work effectively and efficiently.
In hindsight, I can see now I was approaching the peak of my cycle. I was stressed from my breakdown and the new system not working properly. But at the time all I could see was this person who knew NOTHING telling those of us who had to do everything day-to-day and work with this wholly broken system, that we had failed and deserved everything happening to us. But my response was wholly disproportionate and I couldn’t see that at the time. All I could see was the stimulus in front of me, and the response was almost instinctive.
