PMS doesn’t exist. Period. Don’t blame premenstrual syndrome for feeling depressed, stressed and irritable. Turns out it may be a myt (via Gender Medicine, Is PMS moodiness a myth? - thestar.com)
- The researchers don’t dispute physical symptoms linked to menstruation, such as bloating or abdominal pain. But after reviewing 47 studies they found no clear evidence to support the idea that a woman’s menstrual cycle puts her in a negative mood in the days before her periods.
- “This puzzlingly widespread belief needs challenging,” concluded the authors of Mood and the Menstrual Cycle: A Review of Prospective Data Studies.
- Gillian Einstein, one of the report’s authors, told the Star, “We have a menstrual cycle and we have moods, but they don’t necessarily correlate.”
- So why do women attribute feeling down to their menstrual cycles?
- For one thing, PMS is a social construct, rooted in negative feelings many cultures have toward menstruation, a natural female function, said Einstein, a neuroscientist and director of the Collaborative Graduate Program in Women’s Health at the university.
- Another possibility, she suggested, is that “this is the time of the month when women are given permission to not be sweet, docile and cheerful — expected attributes of women.
- “It may be the time of the month when (women) feel they can say what’s on their minds.”
Hence the “translation” Permissible ManSlaughter
