Menophumane: The Normalcy Of Menopause

The Normalcy of Menopause Women have always gone through menopause, that is a known fact. Women get their periods and have it for most of their life, and as they get older they begin to go through menopause, and eventually stop having periods altogether. Yet going through menopause is still seen as a disorder or something that is not normal. Menopause is a completely normal thing, every woman goes through it, it is one of the normal transitions of aging, being compared to puberty in some respects. While most people say, it is a disorder, all in all menopause is just another process of the aging process. Multiple studies have been made to understand menopause. One of the more popular ways to describe this is another form of puberty. Menopause …show more content…
Aristotle had even guessed that women started menopause around the age of forty. While it was not necessarily studied in biblical times, the menstrual cycle and menopause are talked about widely. A more specific example is the story of Abraham and Sarah, who are trying to have a baby, but Sarah having gone through menopause and is the age of 90, cannot conceive. Studies in the 1800’s decided to help women going through menopause with mainly herbal remedies, cannabis and opium being one of the many treatments. These remedies were prescribed to help with the pains of menopause and to take away some pain that may be caused, like growing pains and getting cramps during your menstrual cycle, both things that involve the natural process of aging. Around 1930, menopause then became known as a deficiency disorder, and many studies have been taken trying to connect menopause to mood disorders. A lot of the claims people have said about menopause being linked to mood disorders are claims that a lot of the symptoms between mood disorders and menopause are the same. These theories that menopause is a disorder has since been proven invalid and most people call it ridiculous, seeing as every woman goes through this in their lifetime. Just because there are similarities, does not mean they are one and the …show more content…
One thing that is true is the rise of mental illnesses like depression. Annually 1.3 million women in the United States begin menopause, and 20% of those women are reported to have been diagnosed with depression in that time frame. With insomnia, 40-50% of women said that they began to have sleeping problems, which has been linked to mood disorders and led to people making the claim of menopause again being a disorder. Problems with sleep and its connection to menopause have been shown that it is only this way because of the estrogen deficiency, and once again, the natural process of getting older and your body not needing as much sleep as it did when you were younger. Sleep apnea even increases 6.5% in women from 30-39 and 16% for women 50-60 years. Exactly “3,369 postmenopausal women aged 50-79 years, panic attacks were most prevalent among women in the menopausal transition. These attacks were associated with negative life events, functional impairment, and medical comorbidity (Gramann)”. There is also a peak in schizophrenic incidences with menopausal woman aged 45-50. This is important because there is not a peak in episodes at this age range for men, and men do not normally have a second peak in episodes at all. Research has shown that women with bipolar disorder have more frequency to depressive episodes when they are going through menopause, as with as OCD symptoms becoming more