I am a social work educator with a background in mental health treatment and a PhD student. Menopause and mental health in Ireland is the topic of my thesis.

As I approached midlife, I developed a personal interest in menopause and mental health. This blog was started as a place to collect articles, publications, and my own thoughts on the subject.

If you are here because you’re also interested in menopause and mental health, I hope this information will be of use to you. You can also find my posts on Medium.com and read my personal story below. Thank you for stopping by!

Why I started this blog

After studying psychology and receiving my Masters in Social Work from NYU, I worked in the US as a mental health social worker. I was part of a number of different multidisciplinary teams treating a variety of mental health issues, with many of my clients being women between the ages of 35-60. However, in nearly twenty years of combined education and practice, the only time I heard about the link between mental health and menopause was a brief mention in a class on “Gender and the Life Course.”

I became more interested in this topic two years ago when I began to experience my own perimenopause. Initially, mild physical symptoms were effectively and easily treated with herbal remedies. However, after about six months, my mood flattened. I wasn’t depressed, but while I wasn’t experiencing any lows, I wasn’t feeling any highs, either. Some exciting things were happening in my life, but I could not muster a feeling of happiness about them. That was extremely out of character for me.

At first, I chalked it up to the pandemic, which had “flattened” everything else about life, so why not my mood? But I was disturbed enough to talk to friends about it, and one of them mentioned that she had read on a Facebook group that a flat mood (or anhedonia) could be a symptom of perimenopause.

Since I had relocated to Ireland, I joined The Irish Menopause Facebook group. There I encountered a number of stories from women who were going through the menopause and struggling with many different symptoms, including mental health issues. At first, I was shocked. I was a mental health professional; if such links existed, wouldn’t I have learned about them at some point? The more I read, the more I realized that not only did the links exist, they were the subject of a flurry of new scientific and medical studies. I also learned that many, many medical and mental health professionals were, like me, unaware of these links.

Armed with this information, I went to my wonderful GP. He listened carefully, and while he mentioned that anti-depressants would typically be the first line of treatment, he agreed to first put me on a trial of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). In less than two weeks, my mood had returned to normal. It has stayed that way ever since.

I continued reading the stories on The Irish Menopause Facebook page, other online groups, newspapers, and watching documentaries. What I learned was galvanizing, and fed my desire to do learn more about mental health and menopause. At the National Menopause Summit in Dublin in March 2023, I began to understand the seriousness of the gaps in my own knowledge, not to mention that of other women and those who impact our lives so profoundly: frontline healthcare and mental healthcare providers, employers, and legislators, among others.

It is my hope that by gathering information here and sharing my thoughts, this blog might become a useful resource for all of us. Thank you for reading.

- Sara Kelleher, MSW