Menopause In Crisis The Summer I Lost My Mind

Each year, millions of women around the world reach the age of menopause—that pivotal feminine threshold when the menstrual cycles cease. While many of these women are able to make their way through this time of transition with little more than a few hot flashes and maybe an episode or two of moodiness, for some women it can be far more challenging. According to recent statistics, fifteen to twenty percent of women going through The Change experience such intense physical and emotional upheaval that their lives come to a complete standstill, leaving many with the overwhelming fear that they are losing their minds. Lynda Wyzda was one of these women.In 2005, at the age of forty-six, Lynda Wyzda woke up one night to find herself entering a world of menopausal mayhem she never could have imagined: a racing heart, skyrocketing blood pressure, intense trembling, mind-racking fear. Although she wanted to believe this was all part of a perfectly normal feminine midlife transition, with these “disturbances” growing worse by the day, she soon began to wonder whether there might be something far more complex, something far more worrisome behind her inner turmoil than just shifting hormones. “Still don't know what's happening in my brain…am I dying? Am I going crazy…Or do I have a menopause psychosis? Or perhaps a psychosis related to all of my childhood trauma?”With immediate and sometimes startling prose, Lynda describes her months-long descent into what appeared to be some sort of menopausal madness, a madness that, in time, became so overwhelming and so upending that she began to grow fearful not only for her sanity, but for her life.