Dr Louise Newson: [01:00:00] So today on my podcast I've got Rosie Moss who runs the amazing podcast called Widowed AF. She was widowed, very unexpected death of her husband, left with three young children. We talk about grief but we talk about how sometimes grief can be blamed for symptoms which are actually related to hormonal changes and how a lot of women who have grief can also have a hormonal imbalance. So it's an open conversation, which I know will resonate with many of you. So I hope you enjoy it. So, Rosie, you are now in the hot seat, whereas I was on your podcast a couple of years ago.  [01:00:39][38.9]
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Rosie Moss: [01:00:39] Gosh, right back at the beginning, yeah, about two and a half years ago,.  [01:00:42][2.7]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:00:42] Yeah. So, you've got the podcast, Widowed AF, and I came on it, which was great. But, you know, I think about you a lot, partly because my mum was widowed when I was aged nine, brought up three children, and now I'm older, I think, how the hell did she do it? And then I also think about her a lot because, I can't tell you how old she is because I'm not allowed but you know I'm 55 so a lot of people could probably work out roughly how old she is. She was really lucky because she was struggling with grief, she was struggling not knowing what her future was, she knew she had to move house, she knew she needed a job and she was working as a teacher and she was getting all these symptoms, very hot and back then you weren't even allowed to wear sleeveless you know dresses because it was the 70s, you had to keep your shoulders covered. She got very hot, she got quite irritable and the doctor just said, take this, you're going through the change. She had no idea what it was, because back then no one asked anything. She took the, in fact it was pregnant horses' urine, HRT, but it worked for her. And she's been really lucky because I wonder how my life would have been if my mum hadn't taken hormones from not long after my dad died. My dad died when he was 40 and it was probably a few years after that she got symptoms but her grief, I mean she dreams about him every day and cries a lot even now about him. So she's got big grief, but I wonder what my childhood would have been like because she's done and she still does the most amazing job for all three of us, but it would be very different if she didn't have hormones and it would so easy to blame her grief. So just keen to hear about your story really. [01:02:20][98.1]
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Rosie Moss: [01:02:21] I mean, disimilar actually to your mum's timeline. My husband, Ben, died in 2018 and it was a real cataclysmic shock. It was an accident, a scuba diving accident. And I just, I just look back and I think much like you do for your mum, you know, how did I do that? [01:02:37][16.2]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:02:38] How old were your children then?  [01:02:39][0.9]
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Rosie Moss: [01:02:39] They were seven, five and six months.  [01:02:41][1.6]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:02:41] God.  [01:02:41][0.0]
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Rosie Moss: [01:02:41] Yeah, yeah, it was tough.  [01:02:43][1.5]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:02:42] So it's just out of the blue, no warning? [01:02:44][1.8]
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Rosie Moss: [01:02:44] Yeah, knock on the door from the police. Yeah. And, you know, at the time I was postnatal, my daughter was six months old. I'd just finished breastfeeding. And so my hormones were kind of all over the shop anyway and the first sort of three to four years, I, to the outside world, I coped. What, the way I was coping was I was drinking a lot and I was masking a lot of my feelings. You know, I was squashing them down because I was kind of scared of what was going to come out. And it was about four years in and I felt this kind of seismic change in myself and the only thing I could liken it to was puberty when I felt completely out of control and I ended up feeling quite scared. I didn't know what version of me was going to come down the stairs and in the sort of darker times I'd be thinking my kids would be better off without me. You know, really horrible, dark, negative thoughts, and I didn't know what was the matter with me. I really didn't. I thought I was broken. I thought I was mad bad or broken and I didn't know where to turn.  [01:03:45][61.2]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:03:46] Did you feel worse at certain times of the month or was it the same?  [01:03:49][3.0]
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Rosie Moss: [01:03:49] Yeah, but because I had the coil, I didn't identify that it was monthly.  [01:03:54][4.7]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:03:56] So you were not having periods.  [01:03:56][0.5]
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Rosie Moss: [01:03:56] So I didn t have that kind of timeline to follow. And yeah, it was. And it was starting to kind of take over, initially just a couple of days, and then some months, it'd be a week or even longer. And when I say I was wiped, I'd be in bed staring at a wall. I wouldn't even be able to look at my phone, read, watch television. I would just stare at a wall and cry and think I can't do this anymore. At the time I had a partner, so he was able to help with the children, but we've since separated and that really made me realise how precarious things would have been had I been entirely on my own.  [01:04:30][34.3]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:04:31] And I worry about this a lot actually, I worry about deprived people, I worry about vulnerable people, but I also worry about the impact of hormonal imbalance on children because a lot of people, I'm sure you had some PMDD, you had grief, but there was a hormonal imbalance going on as well. And it's, you can ignore yourself, well you can't, but you know what I mean, like a lot women tell me that they close the blinds, they go to bed, they stare at the walls, and that's awful in itself. But if you've got children who are only dependent on you, what happens then? If you haven't got a partner or haven't got any other people who are going to help with childminding, those children are just stuck in front of a screen and probably not fed, not put to bed and not loved in the same way.  [01:05:20][49.0]
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Rosie Moss: [01:05:21] Yeah, and it's, you know, I'd get the children to school and then I would go back to bed and I'd just pull the duvet over. And then I'd set a timer for when I had to go and pick them up. And I'd sort of get up, put the big dark sunglasses on, drive to the school, you know probably crying, get to school, really not want to speak to anybody. I mean, woe betide a teacher if one of my kids had had a bad day and they needed to you know, the walk of shame when they come towards you. Because I didn't have any resilience to that sort of thing. I took it all very personally. It all felt like it was an attack on me. And yeah, the relationship between me and my kids absolutely did suffer, it did, because they didn't understand what's wrong with mum. And actually, as I began to learn more about hormones and the impact they were having, and that actually I wasn't mad, bad, or broken, I was able to talk to them, particularly the older two, the boys, and explain to them in age-appropriate ways why I might be struggling at certain times of the month. But of course, that's still very scary for a child to see their mum like that.  [01:06:17][56.5]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:06:18] So how did you manage to get help?  [01:06:19][1.3]
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Rosie Moss: [01:06:20] Well, it was a long old process. Initially the NHS, where I have to say, and you know, the NHS is amazing for many things, but women's health, not always. And in the end, it got to a point where I presented at A&E. I'd got to the point where I was begging to be sectioned, I was begging, to be sedated because I was scared. So we went to A&E and I waited in the corridor for hours as you do and then by the time I was seen, actually I was alright, they'd given me some valium and I was feeling calmer. But when I asked to leave, they threatened me with the police. Yeah, they said if I left, the police would come to the house and social services would be involved. At which point I had a meltdown, you know, because I think as soon as somebody threatens what I perceive as my children, then you just...  [01:07:10][49.7]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:07:10] It's a different level, isn't it?  [01:07:11][0.9]
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Rosie Moss: [01:07:11] Yeah, it really is. And that in turn made me very frightened to seek help. The only real support that they would give me was they prescribed progesterone tablets, the mini Pill. Which actually... [01:07:20][9.1]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:07:21] But they're not progesterone, as you probably know.  [01:07:23][1.7]
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Rosie Moss: [01:07:24] And it had an adverse effect on me. It made things worse.  [01:07:26][2.6]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:07:27] Because they block your progesterone working in your body.  [01:07:29][2.1]
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Rosie Moss: [01:07:29] And I just, again, I was thinking, nobody's going to help me. And it's that real sense, and it took me right back actually to being widowed where you're knocking on doors asking for help and everybody's saying, not our problem, or we can't help you, or here's some antidepressants. So it was actually chance. I came across the Newson Clinic and it was, and this is not me saying this because I'm sat across from you, this is genuine. I felt for the first time that somebody cared and listened to me and every individual clinician that I spoke to all came to me with sympathy and kindness and just understanding that actually I might need a higher dose of estrogen, which I do, I'm on 200. But then I've gone back to the NHS since and said, actually, my financial situation has changed, could I come back under the NHS? And again, it was that computer says, no, you're on far too high a dose, we can start you back on 50 and see how you go. And I said, I've done all the work for you, I have done it. And it's not like I've been, you know, buying on the black market, I'm being prescribed it by professionals. [01:08:29][59.8]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:08:29] So they still refused it?  [01:08:30][0.7]
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Rosie Moss: [01:08:31] Yeah.  [01:08:31][0.0]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:08:31] Do you know, it makes me so cross because, you know we run a specialist clinic, we are all specialists. We are all qualified doctors. We're all registered with the GMC. We all have annual appraisals. We've had an outstanding in our CQC who have looked at our doses of prescribing. And there's good evidence that some people don't absorb enough through the skin. There are no guidelines by a regulating authority that say we can't prescribe higher doses.  [01:08:56][25.4]
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Rosie Moss: [01:08:57] No, I quoted that back to them in a sternly worded email.  [01:08:59][2.1]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:09:01] Which is great. But if I was a private psychiatrist and I'd prescribed you an off-label higher dose of antidepressants, there would be no problem. If I was private cardiologist giving you a dose of whatever for your blood pressure or your heart arrhythmia, no one questions it. And this is where, like, we need to turn it on it's head and say hang on, what are my risks of not having the dose that I need. Because I've seen what I was like before, and do they want to just harm women? I don't know.  [01:09:30][29.1]
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Rosie Moss: [01:09:29] This is what I said in the session, in the appointment. I said, you know, you can see my notes in front of you. You can see the distress I was in three years ago before I independently went and sought help for myself. And I said I'm on my own. I've got three children. This is dangerous. This is one of the biggest killers in women over 40. And it was just that, there's nothing we can do. And I felt incredibly frustrated. I think I'm in a very different place to where I was back then. But it just felt like nobody was listening to me and it's so lonely to feel that way.  [01:10:03][34.3]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:10:05] Yeah, It's really hard. It's very, it's very difficult. And I don't know what the answer is really, other than challenging and saying, so what are the risks? Where are the guidelines, where's the evidence? Because there isn't any that shows that a higher dose is harmful because having too lower dose can be harmful as well. But you notice a difference on hormones to your mental health? [01:10:25][20.2]
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Rosie Moss: [01:10:25] I didn't just notice a difference Louise, my life changed. I was able to, don't get me wrong, it's still there, but what I would say is it's two days a month where I'm just very, very tired. I'm a little bit cautious about what I say on WhatsApp groups and in emails. I second-guess myself a little more because I am prone to being a bit stroppy, but that feels to me like quite normal PMS rather than the debilitating hellhole of PMDD. So yeah, I mean, I was able to, to work again, to build up my own podcast. I was able to get back to being the mum that I knew I was, which, you know, I'm never going to be the mum I was before I was widowed because you have to be good cop, bad cop all the time. But that kind of fun side of me began to come back out again.  [01:11:10][45.3]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:11:10] Yes, amazing.  [01:11:10][0.0]
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Rosie Moss: [01:11:11] Things like, you know, I didn't get out of bed and my joints didn't. I felt like I was about 95. I was gaining weight. I was sweating through to the mattress. You know, I felt just horrible all the time. Whereas now I feel like I've got my life back.  [01:11:26][14.5]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:11:26] Yeah, it's amazing and what I often say to patients is you don't know what you're missing until you have it back. And I also say to patients is I don't know how you're going to feel on hormones, but I'm prepared to give them to you get the right physiological dose for you and then we'll see. But when we think about grief, people can have, you know, short term grief, you know, if your great great granny who's in their late 90s dies, of course, that's very sad, but people can move on a lot easier than if it was someone younger or someone like your partner and so unexpected at such a young age and people's grief and their grief reaction can really be different and you know we talk in medicine as people having an abnormal grief reaction which I find is a bit harsh because what's normal and what's abnormal like, my mum still thinks and loves my father so much but it's not abnormal they were so in love and they, you know, but... that warmth is there and it should be there really. So the way that I grieve is different to how my sister and brother grieve, but I don't want to be judged whether it's normal or abnormal. I don't even want someone to talk to me about it. I'm content with how I've changed my life, whatever, because I don't know what I'm missing, you know. But I feel like when we were taught as medical students about grief, it was almost like a bit of a tick box to sort of ask, I don't know... [01:12:53][87.0]
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Rosie Moss: [01:12:54] Five stages, rattle through them.  [01:12:54][0.4]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:12:55] Yeah it was it's a bit like the sort of, the whole cycle of change when people are trying to give up cigarettes you work out where they are and a bit light with grief have you had the anger yet? Have you had the... And it's like well hang on but then what I realised more and more, when I, you know this symptom questionnaire that we've got on Balance with 84 different questions is thinking about other symptoms as well like the physical symptoms of the dry skin, the palpitations, skin changes, joint pains, like you say. Because if you just focus on the mental health symptoms, you're only going to be thinking about grief and you're looking at that side of that person. And I just wonder how many people are just labelled as it's all related to your grief and no one's thinking about hormones.  [01:13:40][45.3]
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Rosie Moss: [01:13:41] Yeah.  [01:13:41][0.0]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:13:42] But if you say, if I was your grief counsellor, and then I did these symptoms, and you also told me you were getting joint pains, and muscle aches, and night sweats, well, that's not related to grief, is it? [01:13:55][13.5]
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Rosie Moss: [01:13:55] Yeah, and I think there's so much around the kind of misdiagnosis, mislabelling, particularly for women. Now I look back at my childhood, I spent time in a young person's unit when I was 17, because nobody knew what was going wrong with me. As it transpires, I'm neurodivergent and had PMDD. But how different might that outcome have been? I was asked to leave school in my A-levels. Yeah, yeah, they didn't know what was wrong with me. [01:14:20][24.7]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:14:19] You're the calmest person I've met.  [01:14:21][1.6]
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Rosie Moss: [01:14:21] Well, I'm well-medicated now. And then things like, you know, being labelled as moody and disruptive or flaky. [01:14:29][7.8]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:14:30] But you see, that's so common for PMDD. It's so common, this disruptive behaviour and PMDD and ADHD are very closely linked. And, you know, I've written about it in my book, and I feel very strongly, I hate labels. I don't even like the term PMDD because what's it telling you? Like, what you want to know is have I got a hormonal imbalance and how do I treat it? Because that's the most important thing. But those hormones in our brain can help all the connections to work. Can help people feel calmer, can help people naturally have that ability to rationalise in the way that you can't when you don't have the hormones, or the hormones are just fluctuating the whole time, which when you're 17 is probably what was happening a lot.  [01:15:13][42.8]
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Rosie Moss: [01:15:13] Yeah, and I just felt like such a freak, for want of a better word, I felt like I was different to everybody else. So what I became very, very good at is masking, which we know is commonly used in neurodiversity, but also I think with the hormone imbalance, I felt I had to be, make myself very likeable, make sure that nobody saw beneath that veneer. And then when I hit the perimenopause and those cracks began to appear and I couldn't mask those traits any more, I felt that everybody was going to abandon me, they would see the real me, you know, and actually it's interesting how particularly when we build up these coping strategies and then you have a significant life event like the loss of your partner which blows all ability to hold that mask up and then you throw in perimenopause as well and it just became untenable. Labels for me have been helpful in a way, they have, but I do sometimes feel like I'm collecting acronyms.  [01:16:08][54.8]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:16:09] Well, I think the label is only helpful if you've got a treatment plan, but a treatment plan that's treating the underlying cause as well, because otherwise you're labelled and then it's been masked with a medication that might or might not be appropriate. And that's where I think thinking about any condition, we've got to always have in the back of our mind, could there be any hormonal imbalance as well? And I think so much with grief, because so many people I see, even my clinic, the dog has died. And it's been awful and everyone's focused on that and said no it can't be all hormones because your dog's died, it's like hang on I can have grief and I can have a hormone imbalance you can have more than one thing going on at the same time.  [01:16:48][38.9]
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Rosie Moss: [01:16:49] Yeah, and I think that's it. I think when you present to the doctors and you say, I feel like I'm losing my mind, I keep crying, I can't eat, I can't sleep. And then I say, Oh, but my husband died. Automatically, that's going to be the assumption, isn't it? If that, well, that must be why. So I was prescribed Sertraline like so many women were... a little. hey prescribe quite a high dose, which I was uncomfortable with because I felt that I needed to feel that grief, that I owed it to him to feel it. I do still take it. I take a very low dose now because I'm in the process of hopefully weaning myself off because I am not actually depressed. And that was the thing that I really struggled with is this version of myself, the staring at the wall, you know, completely non-verbal. That isn't somebody that I recognise in myself. Once I realised it was only happening once a month. I began to be able to separate the condition from myself, if you like, because when you're in it, you can't see out of it and you just think this is untenable. I can't live like this. And that's when those awful ideations begin to sneak in. Because quite frankly, the prospect of living like that all the time forever...  [01:17:53][64.7]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:17:55] It's really scary.  [01:17:55][0.5]
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Rosie Moss: [01:17:55] It's awful. Yeah, awful. Nobody would want that.  [01:17:57][1.4]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:17:57] No, it completely can torment your mind. And the only advantage of PMDD often over menopause is that people with PMDD get a bit of a break because their period comes, they have some hormones and there's a bit a reprise. Sometimes it's not for long, but it's still there. But it can be very difficult and it's very hard to explain to people also when you have mental health symptoms. If you have a rash on your arm, you can show someone and get sympathy. But it's not the same when it's inside, is it?  [01:18:29][31.6]
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Rosie Moss: [01:18:29] No, and when you're in the midst of a crisis, you're not capable of advocating for yourself and explaining what's going on because you just have this kind of angry spiky ball. And then I would come through it and I'd think, oh, I'm fine now, I'll cancel that doctor's appointment because again, much like when you were in it, you can't remember it being good. When it's good, it's hard to remember it being that bad.  [01:18:50][20.6]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:18:49] Yeah, totally. And I totally, it is that Jekyll and Hyde, the sort of black and white, night and day. There's nothing grey in between with PMDD. And when I opened the clinic eight years ago, we called it a menopause and wellbeing centre because I was too scared of women with PMDD because they change so quickly and I didn't feel that I had enough clinical experience really. But over the years I've had more knowledge and now, it's really, we call ourselves women's hormones experts because I actually really enjoy seeing, it sounds a bit weird, I really enjoy seeing women with PMDD because I know I can help them. Because what I don't enjoy is the stories and the suffering because often, and the dismissal from so many people. But when you ask just that really easy question, you know, how do you feel when you have your period? Do you feel different those days before your periods, then, you know it's related, not maybe all of it, but a lot of it is related to hormones. I went to a group, a meeting of people, sort of stakeholder meeting for a PMDD group. And they're all just talking about talking treatments and I went there with one of the doctors, Hannah Ward, who's actually been on my podcast talking about her own PMDD and how she was close to ending her life and no-one would give her treatment and the antidepressants didn't work so she managed to get a prescription for progesterone and it transformed and saved her life as well and she read a lot of Katharina Dalton's work from the 50s and 60s. We've all read it, we've reactivated her work from that time and see the transformational effects of progesterone. So she was there not just as a doctor but someone with her own lived experience and they just don't want to listen.  [01:20:38][108.4]
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Rosie Moss: [01:20:38] No.  [01:20:38][0.0]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:20:38] It's like, of course, having a cup of tea with a friend is going to help. Of course talking therapy is going to help, but it's not going to treat the underlying cause. You know, if I had a knife in my arm and it was painful, you giving me a cup a tea would help me a bit.  [01:20:51][12.8]
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Rosie Moss: [01:20:51] A bit of sugar in it for you.  [01:20:52][0.9]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:20:52] Yeah. But it would be a lot better if you took the knife out and took me to the hospital. You know what I mean. It just feels like people are just blinded by it, or they want to give people antidepressants. [01:21:01][9.1]
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Rosie Moss: [01:21:01] And that's, the antidepressant one is quite a big one for me...  [01:21:05][3.8]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:21:06] It's huge.  [01:21:06][0.2]
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Rosie Moss: [01:21:06] ...because I was given antidepressants  when I was quite young. When I was at university I was put on to Prozac and Prozac I suspect actually really helped me. I think it masked a lot of the neurodiversity which, did it help me or you know, that's another conversation really but it enabled me to function in a society that wasn't really built for me. Then the sertraline, but it's that sense of slightly disconnect, you know, that numbing of your feelings. And also you've got the other side effects, things like lack of libido and you know you can gain weight, it can increase sweating. There's lots of other negative side effects which...  [01:21:40][33.8]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:21:40] We're understanding more and more about the negative effects of antidepressants. I did a podcast with Mark Horowitz a few months ago, but he talks about the risks of osteoporosis and dementia, and women without hormones have an increased incidence of osteoporosis and dementia. But no-one really talks about that the risks of the antidepressants and I used to prescribe them a lot, because I was only taught about the benefits of them. I remember one patient, and I think that she probably did have a hormonal imbalance that I hadn't checked and thought about, but she told me that she'd crashed her car, she'd gone into the wall next to her house and parked it really badly, but it was really smashed. And I said, how does that make you feel? She goes, oh well, I just got out and thought, oh dear. And I said oh, she goes, yeah, I could have run over my best friend and I would have gone, oh, well. And I said, do you think those antidepressants are really doing you any good? She said, no, I'm really scared because it makes me realise they've made me too numb. And it was the first time, this was many years ago, it was probably about 20-25 years ago. And I just remember her so well thinking, oh my gosh, you know, me giving her that prescription has that made her feel like this. And, you, know, it's incredible that you don't realise the harm that's being done with these medications. But then I was also taught treatment of PMDD, and it's still on guidelines, is you give women antidepressants for two out of four weeks.  [01:23:06][86.6]
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Rosie Moss: [01:23:08] Yes.  [01:23:08][0.0]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:23:08] But why would you do that? [01:23:08][0.7]
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Rosie Moss: [01:23:09] And apparently, I mean, in all other areas of antidepressants, they have a three week...  [01:23:13][3.8]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:23:14] Yeah, I know.  [01:23:15][0.7]
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Rosie Moss: [01:23:15] ...what would you call it, a settling in period.  [01:23:16][0.6]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:23:17] So they are not really going to work.  [01:23:17][0.0]
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Rosie Moss: [01:23:17] So I can't tell how it would work...  [01:23:19][2.0]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:23:19] I can't...  [01:23:19][0.0]
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Rosie Moss: [01:23:19] Because my doctor did suggest that I perhaps try that and take it, but I was like I'm not brilliant at tracking, so I probably get the days wrong anyway. And then you sort of think, well, once I'm in it, it's too late.  [01:23:29][10.2]
Dr Louise Newson: [01:23:30] It just feels really weird, like yeah, totally, because like I say, it's like night and day and it's often a very quick downhill. If you suddenly wake up one morning and you don't want to be waking up, you know, you feel dreadful. Firstly, you're probably not going to feel like taking anything but secondly, it can take two weeks to have an effect, you'll be off them again by then.  [01:23:47][17.2]
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Rosie Moss: [01:23:47] You'll feel fine by then. [01:23:48][0.6]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:23:48] It just doesn't. But the most recent guidelines I was looking at recently, there's some national guidelines and international guidelines and they still talk about antidepressants. All they talk about is the synthetic hormones, the progestogens. And then they've got a little thing about progesterone at the bottom, we've not got enough evidence. Well, we have got a lot of common sense actually and we know out of all the medication, including blocking hormone, you know, the injections like Zoladex that block hormones, they talk about removing ovaries and even anti-psychotic like quetiapine, it's like well, all of those treatments have risks. Having a natural hormone, I can't see any risks, I don't understand any risks...  [01:24:28][39.7]
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Rosie Moss: [01:24:28] The mind boggles...  [01:24:29][0.3]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:24:29] So yeah.  [01:24:28][-0.3]
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Rosie Moss: [01:24:29] And actually, at my worst, I was prescribed, I can't pronounce it, the quetiapine was it?  [01:24:33][3.6]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:24:33] Quetiapine, yeah.  [01:24:34][0.5]
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Rosie Moss: [01:24:34] Which I received the prescription. I was under the care of a private psychiatrist at this point for the ADHD. And he sent this prescription and I remember getting it and Googling it, because you do, don't you and reading what it was for and just thinking, oh my gosh, am I mental? You know, am. I really... [01:24:49][14.8]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:24:49] Well it's a heavy duty drug.  [01:24:50][0.6]
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Rosie Moss: [01:24:51] Whoa.  [01:24:51][0.0]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:24:51] Did you take it?  [01:24:52][0.5]
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Rosie Moss: [01:24:52] No. No, I didn't. But I do remember begging my GP and my psychiatrist for sedatives because I felt the only way to keep myself safe during a PMDD episode was sedatives. So for a while he would prescribe diazepam, which I could take when things got really, or lorazepam even. I mean, again, they're very...  [01:25:08][16.0]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:25:09] But they didn't give you hormones?  [01:25:10][0.6]
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Rosie Moss: [01:25:11] No.  [01:25:11][0.0]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:25:12] It's amazing, isn't it? And quetiapine actually blocks your own hormone production.  [01:25:16][3.3]
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Rosie Moss: [01:25:16] Does it? Oh my goodness. [01:25:18][2.1]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:25:20] So,Yeah, it can increased prolactin, a hormone in the brain, which then suppresses your hormone production, so progesterone, estradiol and testosterone, it basically gives you a chemical menopause. Yeah.  [01:25:30][10.1]
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Rosie Moss: [01:25:31] And actually, when you're talking about these antidepressants and a lot of the uncomfortable symptoms of menopause, things like the sweating and libido, they cause that. So you could be on, trying to get help for your symptoms and actually they're making them worse.  [01:25:43][11.7]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:25:45] And we don't really know, I've been trying to look at some of the data, but no one's done the studies so the data is not there. Looking to see if antidepressants have any blocking effects in any of the pathways for hormone production, because so many of the symptoms of so-called depression are related to a hormonal imbalance. And some of the side effects like the anhedonia, this sort of lack of joy, not wanting to do anything, not being bothered about things.  [01:26:08][23.7]
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Rosie Moss: [01:26:08] I've never heard that word before.  [01:26:09][0.8]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:26:10] Yeah, anhedonia. Yeah, it's a great word. How much of that is related to hormones as opposed to a pure side effect of the drugs? You know, I'm always very interested in how drugs work and, you know, because I understand the action of our own hormones and how they work in the body and there's so much we don't understand about the drugs that we just, well, I don't prescribe them anymore, but that people prescribe all the time, but we have to be thinking about the harms, but also the most important thing is thinking about the choice for women. And that, to me, is the most important part of my work, is women being able to choose. But it's hard if you haven't got an advocate, or you haven't got the right knowledge, to really choose what's right for you, isn't it? [01:26:50][40.7]
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Rosie Moss: [01:26:51] And a lot of the the knowledge gets shared amongst women, doesn't it. It's, you know, women chatting at the school gate or at work.  [01:26:57][6.3]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:26:58] Totally.  [01:26:58][0.0]
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Rosie Moss: [01:26:58] It was a neighbour. I was absolutely, you know, beside myself, I'd managed to get my daughter home from school and she walked past and she said, are you all right? No. And it just came flooding out. And she said to me, you need to get some hormone treatment. A friend of mine has been on hormone treatment, she's had, it's been revolutionary. And she said, make sure you ask about testosterone. And I'd never heard of testosterone and this is, you know, I'm on social media accounts. I watch the news, but nobody was talking about it outside of this world of 40 something women who were sharing this information like it was a prized secret. And you think, well, why isn't this widely available? Why are we being denied it?  [01:27:35][36.7]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:27:36] It's madness isn't it? It doesn't make sense when you're being offered all these other drugs as well. So we've got a lot to do. And I think one of the ways the future is going to change is by women empowering other women and talking and just having choice. So I'm really grateful for you coming onto the podcast. We've talked about lots. I always end with three take home tips. So there will be people listening who will be having grief, whether it's recent or in the past. They'll be thinking about various loved ones that they're missing, and it will be creating some, I'm sure, emotion for them. So what three things would you say if someone is having any sort of grief process, what three things do you think help people the most?  [01:28:22][46.6]
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Rosie Moss: [01:28:24] So the one that I would always recommend is this and it's kind of relevant, you know, we talked about women sharing knowledge, is find your tribe. Whether that be an online network, whether it be a podcast, I know a good one, or whether it be in real life because there are real life meetups that go on all over the country. It's about, because you will feel no matter how amazing your friends and family are, you will feel very lonely and isolated. So I think finding people who have a shared common experience is number one. Number two is, I mean, it's really, really tough to say this to people because when they're grieving and someone says, you need to take care of you and you think, oh, yeah, whatever as you are mainlining wine and pizza... [01:28:57][33.9]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:29:00] But it's so important.  [01:29:00][0.0]
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Rosie Moss: [01:29:00] But the second I started treating myself as somebody who deserves some care, the better I felt. And that's not to say it's perfect. Now, I don't go and walk every single day. I don't eat perfectly every day. I don't do yoga every day, but as long as I'm relatively consistent, I'm able to keep that real dark, acute, overwhelming grief at bay. But also my third point would be let it out sometimes. You know, don't try so hard to keep it at bay that you forget to grieve or you become scared of grieving. As soon as I allow myself to have the little kind of incremental cries and to feel sad because it's really sad, you know, it is really sad. Then I felt like I had a little bit more control. I guess you're so, it's like a Pandora's box. You're so scared of opening it, of what might come out, that you just lock it in tighter and that doesn't do your mental, physical or emotional health any good.  [01:29:51][51.0]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:29:51] That is so great and Widowed AF, listen to the podcast, download it, share it.  [01:29:58][6.6]
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Rosie Moss: [01:29:58] Thank you.  [01:29:58][0.3]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:29:59] And thank you so much for coming today.  [01:30:00][1.3]
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Rosie Moss: [01:30:00] Thank you for having me, Louise.  [01:30:01][0.9]
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Dr Louise Newson: [01:30:01] Thank you. So just a quick one, it would be really great if you could follow or subscribe to this podcast. This will really help me reach more people with evidence-based information about hormones and their future health, and also means you never miss a future episode. Thank you.  [01:30:05][0.0]