When you're told it's stress

One of the most demoralising parts of the transition is not the sleep or the fog — it is not being believed about them. Many women describe walking into an appointment with a real, physical change and walking out with the quiet message that they are anxious, overwrought, or simply getting older. The frustrating truth is that this has a documented pattern behind it.

The pattern has a name

A well-known analysis by Diane Hoffmann and Anita Tarzian, “The Girl Who Cried Pain” (2001), laid out how women’s pain is more likely to be under-treated and more likely to be attributed to emotional or psychological causes rather than physical ones — with women sometimes waiting longer for treatment as a result. It is a bias in the system, not a flaw in you, and naming it is oddly steadying: the problem is real, so the fix can be practical.

Why perimenopause is especially vulnerable to it

The changes of perimenopause overlap almost perfectly with ordinary midlife stress — tiredness, low mood, poor concentration, irritability. That overlap makes “it is probably stress” an easy, plausible-sounding conclusion, especially in a ten-minute appointment. Jen Gunter argues in The Menopause Manifesto that the antidote is not louder insistence but better information — yours and theirs. When you can describe the pattern precisely, it becomes much harder to wave off.

How to walk in harder to dismiss

• Bring specifics, written down: what changes, how often, since when, and how it affects your work and your days. A record reads as data; a description in the moment reads as a mood.
• Name what you want — to explore whether this is perimenopause, to discuss options including hormone therapy, to rule things out — rather than only listing complaints.
• If you are offered an antidepressant for what you think are hormonal changes, it is reasonable to ask that the hormonal explanation be considered too, not instead.
• Ask for the reasoning behind a no, and for a second opinion if it does not hold up.

The practical companion to this is talking to your doctor, and if hormone therapy is part of what you want to raise, hormone therapy after the scare.

How Still Me helps

This is the exact problem Still Me’s doctor-prep session was built for. It interviews you — calmly, in your own words — and produces one page: what is happening, how often, since when, how it is affecting you, and the questions worth asking. You hand it over, or read from it, instead of trying to hold it all together under a clinician’s gaze. Women who have used it describe the same shift: they walked in with a record, and nobody said the word stress. Being organised is not the same as being difficult — it is how you get taken seriously.

Grounded in Hoffmann & Tarzian, “The Girl Who Cried Pain” (Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 2001); and Jen Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto.