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My Experience of Autistic Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder

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Today host Danielle Sullivan discusses pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder, what it’s like to live with it, and its higher than average incidence among people with autism and/or ADHD.

Want to listen? This post is based off of Episode 63 of the Neurodiverging Podcast! Listen on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Youtube
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Transcript of Episode 63: My Experience of Autistic Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder

Thanks to nakia henderson for their work on this transcription.

Hello, my friends and welcome back to the Neurodiverging podcast! My name is Danielle Sullivan and I’m your host. I’m very happy to be here with you today, thanks for tuning in. 

Today you have just me on my lonesome again and we’re talking about menstruation. I know, everyone’s favorite topic, but this is actually I think a really important under-discussed topic as it relates to autistic and ADHD people who menstruate and I want to talk about it today. This is actually prompted by a discussion that was happening over on Autastic! If you don’t know about Autistic, this is not sponsored, but they are an awesome community for late-identified autistic people, they especially prioritize the space for people of color who are autistic. 

So if you’re looking for a community of late-identified autistic people, there’s a link down below that you can use to check it out. I will say, although this is not a sponsored message, I do run a class over there called “Autistic Emotions Explained” and so if you are interested in that class, I’ll put the link down below too, but you can join for free, you don’t have to buy the class.

Are people with ADHD more prone to PMDD?

Anyway, so there was a discussion happening there, I think there was an article posted by Diane who actually leads the community, talking about premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD, and its higher-than-average incidence among ADHD and autistic people. I was actually diagnosed with PMDD before I was diagnosed with autism and until I was diagnosed, I had never heard of it, not even once. 

And so looking into the article that Diane posted and then reading more research around this, I was like, “This is a topic we need to talk about. This is important,” so that’s what we’re going to do today. I’m just going to give you a very basic overview of what PMDD is and how it affected me and sort of just share my story with you because I figure, I didn’t know what it was and also was late-identified. Maybe someone listening is dealing with these symptoms and struggling and also doesn’t know it’s a thing, so maybe I can help someone by talking about so that’s what we’re going to do today.

Before we dive in today, of course, I just want to thank my patrons for supporting my ability to come online and talk about menstruation! I really appreciate it. A lot of the topics we cover here at Neurodiverging are just not covered elsewhere in depth, and so your support means everything and getting this information out to people and I just really appreciate you. 

If you find this podcast helpful, if you’d like to throw in some support, please go to patreon.com/neurodiverging. We have lots of cool perks that we can offer in return and of course, you are doing good by supporting our ability to produce more resources for folks here, so we really appreciate it. That’s patreon.com/neurodiverging. 

What PMDD feels like?

So, now let me talk a little bit about my experience with PMDD. So, as I said, PMDD stands for premenstrual dysphoric disorder and it’s a hormonal health condition that causes relatively significant like it impairs your life significant, depression, anxiety, mood swings, and sometimes some physical symptoms, like cramping, just discomfort in your body. And it usually happens about the week leading up to the beginning of your period. 

So, what happens is the week before your period, you feel like shit and then after you get your period, you go back to feeling pretty normal, right? So the symptoms are intense and then the minute you get your period, they sort of drop off and that’s PMDD in a nutshell. Now, lots of folks are uncomfortable (laughs) before and on their period, that is not PMDD, right? PMDD is more excessive than that. It’s not just like you feel kind of gross, it’s like you are clinically depressed, clinically anxious, you have significant mood swings and you’re just irritable to the point of not being able to function like it’s impeding your ability to go about your day-to-day life more than your average sort of— I’m not going to say your period is like— I have terrible periods, anyway, regardless of PMDD, but that it is more significant that. 

Some other symptoms involve sort of the depression aspect of not being interested in things you’re usually interested in, having difficulty concentrating, having appetite changes where you’re a lot hungrier or less hungry than usual, sleep challenges, like either you can’t fall asleep or you sleep too much, so your sleep is different and not average for you, being more easily overwhelmed, and also sometimes some physical symptoms like breast tenderness, chest tenderness, joint, muscle pain, feeling bloated, sometimes gaining some weight, losing weight. So there’s a lot in there, right?

PMDD is more severe than PMS so it’s not the same as PMS. PMDD is 3 to 9% of menstruating people, right? So it’s not uncommon— PMDD usually interferes with your functioning, you need treatment for it to resolve it, you often need medication for it to resolve, and people with PMDD are more significant risks for suicidality or suicide attempts because of that depression/anxiety aspect. 

And if you think of 9% of people who menstruate, that’s like a lot of people, right? And some portion of those people are going to be autistic and otherwise neurodivergent and are already going to be dealing with unstable and easily influenced mood and irritability, and anxiety, and appetite changes, and sleep difficulties, and feelings of overwhelm, right? And fatigue, and difficulty concentrating. So that’s why I wanted to talk about this today. 

So now that I’ve given you some basic information— and I’m going to put some articles down below that I’d encourage you to read if you want more information about PMDD, and please, obviously, go talk to a doctor or other medical professional if this sounds like something that you might be experiencing because I am not one of those, but I do want to share my personal experience with that because I think that personal experiences often enable us to envision the reality of what people are going through, right? 

So I was diagnosed autistic when I was around 32. I never remember the— I got to just memorize the age I was when I was diagnosed because I can never remember, but I think I was around 32, it was after my first child was born. Okay? So prior to that, I have always had trouble with my periods and I come from a family where it was sort of just assumed that you would have trouble with your periods. 

Is there a genetic component to PMDD?

My mother was always a heavy bleeder, her mother, but it was accepted that you were going to have very heavy bleeding and you were going to have very significant mood swings, irrationality, anxiety, and depression around your period. And in my mother’s defense, there was not… like “women’s issues” quote, unquote aren’t as well-researched, right? And certainly, women are “irrational people,” and so of course you wouldn’t research why we become more irrational, potentially, during our menses, right?

Obviously, that’s old outdated stereotypical information, but a lot of the medical and scientific community operates unfortunately on old outdated stereotypical information. So in my mother’s defense, we did not have evidence to the contrary, and you only know what you know, right? So in my family it was understood that we would maybe get heavy, uncomfortable periods with a lot of physical symptoms attached, significant fatigue attached, and a lot of irritability and maybe depression/anxiety, and that was just part and parcel of having a period when I was growing up. 

And as a teenager and even into college— there were times when I was in college that the fatigue was so intense, I would get nausea around my period, I would sleep all day, I would not eat regularly because getting up to eat would make me more nauseous. You’re using a lot of energy, first of all, to have a period (laughs), right? Your body is literally using all this energy to create the uterine lining and then it’s using all this energy to drop it, right? That’s like— it’s a caloric need. You need more calories at certain points of your cycle to make up for that. So not eating during it is like a significant loss and contributes to fatigue. 

So I was like not able to eat, I certainly couldn’t function, I was nauseous. I would have to skip class the day or two of my period. I went through so many, so many tampons and pads and other things because I was a heavy bleeder. Now I had been tested for iron deficiency, my iron was fine. I’d been tested for anemia, I had had my thyroid looked at, right? So like we were aware that I was having symptoms that were impacting my life, but everyone kind of put it down to just worse-than-average periods, right? PMS. But until much later, I didn’t realize there was something like more than PMS that you could be diagnosed with. 

So anyway, I got through college, but every time I got my period it significantly impacted my ability to function on a day-to-day level. I will say another thing that’s normal in my family is that we got our periods for like 10 days but every like eight weeks. So that’s how my mother is. I don’t know about my sisters but that’s how I was prior to having kids— cycles can change after you have babies so I’ll talk about that in a minute. 

Can PMDD last for weeks?

For 10-ish days, every couple of months I would have this significant burden on my life, but then I would have several months of kind of not having to deal with it, right? I had this really long extended cycle. And because it was extended and it was past sort of the like medically recommended 30-day cycle, you know, I went to the doctor, I had some testing done et cetera to try to see if there was something else going on because sometimes an extended cycle can be significant and be related to other sort of like reproductive system issues. 

Luckily, I didn’t have, like, I didn’t have any cysts, I didn’t have any— I didn’t have any other reproductive system issues, I just had an extremely long period that was extremely draining, right? But no, like nothing medicine could find that was wrong, right? I think of it very similarly to how I think about how my autism was undiagnosed, that I kind of just sucked it up. I was kind of like, “Well, this is how my life is. I’m just going to have to push through. Like other people don’t get ways out just because they have hard periods,” right? 

And also, I was sort of under the impression that this was relatively normal. Like there’s obviously a range of how people experience menses, but I was like, well, some people have these every 30-day periods, and some people I know don’t get cramps or don’t have significant bloating or aren’t significantly fatigued, but certainly there are other people like me who have long periods or heavy periods or have fatigue associated with it. And so I’ve got the bad end of the stick but it’s like still within this range of average, I was under the assumption. 

Does birth control make PMDD better or worse?

So I didn’t really understand that maybe it’s normal but not healthy, right? And I’ll just mention that when I was in my 20s and became more sexually active, I did also say, “Well, let me try going on birth control to see if that reduces the level of bleeding or the length of my bleeds. If that reduces my symptoms of like fatigue and overwhelm and the not eating and the nausea and all that.” And I tried quite a couple of birth control pills. 

One of them made me actively suicidal, that was not good. One of them made me significantly depressed. Not suicidal, but not able to like function normally. One of them was fine for years and then I started having panic attacks and when we dropped the birth control, they stopped!

I mean, a lot of autistic people anecdotally report that we don’t respond to medication the same way non-autistic people do. I think that’s definitely true for me and has been proven over and over again in a lot of cases. But with birth control, I  was really hyper-vigilant around the idea of birth control for a very long time, just because I had so much difficulty with it. 

Finally, when I was in my late 20s I got an IUD. It was the Mirena one, right? Which is a low hormone, I think progesterone IUD, and that reduced my bleeds. I had them less often, they were much shorter and it also, honestly, made me feel better. I had less cramping, I was less tired. Yeah, I wasn’t as fatigued so my day-to-day functionality was better. I was eating, I was drinking, I was sleeping normally. Everything just improved! And I was under the impression that that was all just due to the fact that I wasn’t having a period as often anymore. 

With the IUDs, sometimes periods go away altogether. Mine never did, but I was gone from, you know, from going 10 days of heavy bleeding, every three months to, like, one or two days of very, very light spotting every month, which is a significant difference, right?

And so I thought, “Oh, I’m having a positive emotional reaction to the ease of this menstrual cycle compared to all my other ones and that’s why I feel better.” It doesn’t really have anything to do with like, you know, the period itself. It’s how I feel about my period, right? That’s how I interpreted it at the time.

So I had the IUD and I had it for like a year or two and then we asked for it to be removed so that we could try to have a baby. I got pregnant really quickly— my experience of pregnancy was not awesome but we’ll leave that for another (laughs weakly) another video sometime— and I had my baby, and I didn’t want to go on birth control right away again, because I was concerned about the possibility that birth control could interfere with lactation and I wanted to nurse.

Is PMDD worse after having kids?

So, I was finally off birth control for the first time in many years after being on the pills and then being on the IUD. And I’d also obviously just had a baby, which is a huge hormonal shift and also lifestyle shift and all these things happening. And I had significant difficulty adjusting to the life of being a parent. I had difficulty nursing initially though I eventually continued to nurse until that child was 4 years old and I had another child and I nursed for another two or three years after that. So although it was successful, I had a lot of difficulty adjusting to it.

I had difficulty adjusting to the sleep schedule, the demands of parenting, the kind of communication burden, and just the shifting in the relationship that happened when we became parents. So there was a lot going on, kind of emotionally, mentally in my life that I want to give credit to that as being significant and a significant burden.

But I also, around the time my son was 6 months old which I think is really when the fatigue started to hit because the first couple of months you have a lot of help and you’re like wiped but also people are still bringing you food or checking in with you or whatever. For us around six months old the support really fell away, but we were still, you know, not sleeping through the night— we didn’t sleep through the night for many years. You’re still not back to normal eating habits, you’re still sort of restructuring your life to fit a baby— at least I was as an undiagnosed autistic person who was used to routines and organized. Like this is how you do the thing, black and white thinking, having to adjust to having a baby was very challenging.

Anyway, about six months after I had the baby my menses returned. There is usually a delay after you have a child, especially if you chest feed. And so my menses returned, it was (pauses) it was like having an IUD, it was really light, it happened every 30 days. It was the easiest periods I have ever had in my entire life were when my child was six months old until about when my child was 13 months old I got pregnant again with my second.

That pregnancy was also really (laughs) challenging. We had the baby, same thing I nursed her, and then about six months after birth my menses came back again. This time it was so— it was back to how it was when I was a teenager. So heavy, very spaced out, exhausting! I was so tired, so overwhelmed, so— like I couldn’t execute at all. I didn’t have any functionality, I couldn’t make decisions, I was not focused. I didn’t communicate well.

I couldn’t think from A to B. Some of this was extreme exhaustion from being a parent of two children under the age of three, nursing all through the night, children not sleeping through the night. 

Is PMDD linked to autism?

Some of it was undiagnosed autism and all the issues that come along with that in terms of me not knowing how to support myself and my partner not knowing how to support me, and my family not knowing how to support me, right? So burnout, autistic burnout, and meltdowns and overwhelm.

On top of that, though, I felt even more fatigued and even more overwhelmed the week before my period came. My periods had spaced themselves back out again to be between six and eight weeks apart, so I never knew exactly when they were coming. They weren’t like routine. Like, some people I know can to the dot say, you know, “On the 7th of next month is when my period’s going to start.” I have never had that kind of cycle. I’m very envious of people who like can plan ahead around their periods.

But I did notice eventually— and I will say, I was slow to pick up on the pattern because I was so overwhelmed by everything else that had to do with being a parent to very young children, and all the mental health concerns that come up with being autistic and stuff. At the time I was misdiagnosed with kind of the “baby blues”, right? And I was also diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder.

And I was very anxious, but I will say now that I was anxious because my autistic needs were not being met and because I had not been diagnosed with PMDD yet. Now that I have treatment for PMDD and I have a support system in place for being autistic I do not struggle with anxiety. I do not consider myself to have generalized anxiety disorder anymore, but that was the diagnosis I had at the time anyway.

Anyway, it got really bad. I was constantly overwhelmed but I noticed that the week before my period I was having what I can only term as rage spikes. I’m a person who feels emotion and I do get angry at things, but I have never, ever in my life been someone who externalized that anger into violence except when my second child was around 8-months-old.

Why does PMDD make me so angry?

So two months after my menses came back, after the second birth, I started having these, like, rage attacks. Like I just couldn’t control my temper. I actively felt like I could not control my body and my words and my feelings. This is the first time in my life I ever felt like that and it was extremely alienating and scary, like frightening, actively frightening, I was worried that I was going to hurt myself or my kids just through making bad decisions. Like being irrational, not being able to think through problems because I would just have this spike of huge, like, Hulk rage.

That feeling of that sort of violent anger made me feel more anxious, it stressed me out. I was already not sleeping well due to babies, but also with my periods, I had poor sleep a couple of nights before my period came, and the lack of sleep on top of the other lack of sleep made those irrational feelings and that kind of cognitive delay even worse. I could not think.

I’ve always been someone who can be really upset and not cry. I’m not really a crier on a day-to-day level. Right before my period, I will cry about anything and it doesn’t matter how I feel, right? I can feel happy and cry. I can feel sad and cry. I can feel angry and cry. I can have very little active feeling and still cry. I just cry when I’m hormonal, when I’m about to have my period (laughs), it’s like, I don’t know why. I don’t know the science behind it. That is my experience though.

I started having these crying jags that would last for hours where I was just crying and crying and crying and couldn’t stop myself. And I couldn’t tell that there was anything wrong! It was really—  it was really weird, it was really divorced. It was like my body having a physical reaction to something, but I didn’t know the source, right? It’s like if you can imagine constantly being startled and not knowing what’s startling you or constantly laughing and not knowing why. It was like why am I crying? There’s nothing wrong? 

It was again worse because I was tired, overwhelmed et cetera. Like everything is contributing to everything else and I want to be clear about that but it was so, so weird (pauses) and stressful and off-put— like I cannot say how off-putting it was. I felt like I didn’t have control of myself, I felt like I didn’t have control of my body.

I went to the doctor and they misdiagnosed it as postpartum depression. My baby at this point was 8 and 10 months old and that was my youngest. We were dealing with this actively, I went to the doctor a bunch between when she was 8 and 10 months. My son at the time had just been diagnosed with autism and he’s about two years older, so he was about three. 

He was still not speaking. He had some delayed motor skills, so it was a very busy— I was stay-at-home with both of them so I was under significant stress just from my day-to-day life. I still had not been diagnosed as autistic. I was still doing the research to learn about autism and ADHD for my kiddos. Finally— I mean, I checked in with my doctor a bunch of times, I wasn’t given particularly good information, I switched doctors.

I think I went to two new ones and I still— like, people were nice to me, they heard me, I felt like I was listened to, but nobody was like, “Oh, I know what this is.” Finally one of my doctors was like, “You know, you’ve been reporting anxiety and depression significantly for a long enough that it might be worth trying a depression or anxiety med like an SSRI.” And I was like, at the point, you know, I didn’t want to have rage attacks at my 10-month-old! Like, what kind of parent would want that?

And I was at this point where I felt like I had tried everything. I had been doing my meditation and taking care of myself and walking and doing all the self-care stuff. And it wasn’t— I mean, I’m not going to say it did nothing, but it wasn’t fixing the rage issues, and I knew it was period-related because it was right before my period. And then, like I said, you know, earlier when I was describing PMDD, I would get my period and would be fine, right?

Do you need medication for PMDD?

It wasn’t like everything miraculously fixed. I was still tired, I was still a parent of two neurodivergent kids, who was at home by myself, most of the day with them, it was still exhausting, but I wasn’t having rage attacks after my period started, it was just right before them. And I was like, I told her, I remember having this conversation with her and I was saying, “I feel really weird about starting an SSRI to resolve an issue that is occurring one week out of the month,” right?

At the same time, I felt like I didn’t know what else to do. Like it wasn’t sustainable the way it was. It wasn’t safe for us, for me or my kids to maintain that and so we started an SSRI. I don’t remember which one. I had the traditional weird autistic reaction of this SSRI made me fall asleep at random times of the day (laughs). I remember— so I was home with a toddler and a nonverbal three or four-year-old. I could not fall asleep in the middle of the day. It was not, like, it was not safe. It was not safe.

And I remember a couple of times I fell asleep on the couch and I woke up and I was in a panic. Like, “Where’s my kids?” Like, “What happened?” And they were the best kids. I have the best kids. They were fine! They were fine. They were like, you know, sitting eating Cheerios. Occasionally my son would help my daughter with something because I fell asleep, but I was like, he’s four. He does not need to be helping her with anything, I need to be able to be awake.

And so I went back to the doctor and I said, “This one makes me fall asleep, can we do something else?” And she was like (laughs), ” I’ve never had any other patient who reported that side effect but I believe you,” and this is why she is still my doctor to this day. She said, “But I believe you, so let’s try something else.” So she gave me a different script and I started that one and I’m still on that script to this day. I noticed right away my very next cycle that the rage was gone. Gone. Gone! (laughs)

So all of my internalized concerns about how I was just a bad mother and I wasn’t, you know, and I didn’t love my kids enough. It was like no, none of that was true. It was hormones affecting the way I was thinking and the way I was behaving.

Rage was gone, sleep is still not great I will say to this day, but it’s very clear when it’s before my period and it’s like two days where I stay up too late before my period, and that’s fine. I can accept that. That’s a reasonable (laughs) like, a reasonable effect, okay? I’m still fatigued during my period. I still bleed heavily, like I still have my “normal” quote, unquote, my “normal” menses experience, but I’m not as fatigued. I don’t fall asleep for days and days, I don’t lose all functionality to where I can’t eat or pee or drink water or any of those things.

How does PMDD affect daily life?

I can go for walks, I can see my friends. I can, you know, watch a whole movie and maintain that focus. I can write an article for my blog or record this podcast and maintain focus on it in a way I couldn’t before I started the SSRI. 

I am so grateful that my provider suggested this, but even when we started it neither of us had this diagnosis of PMDD. It was more of a she saw something that looked like anxiety and depression that was sustained over the course of a long time, and she said, “Let’s try this intervention,” right?

Once the intervention worked, like once I was no longer having these rage spirals and constantly concerned that I was going to hurt one of my kids, then I started researching, and I was looking, like what? What is this? Like, okay, we’ve resolved it but what is it? (laughs) And I found PMDD. I read some research articles on it. At the time and still, to this day it’s relatively understudied and not well understood, like how it happens is not well understood. I brought these papers to my doctor and she read them and she was like, “Yeah. That’s— yeah. I mean I can give you the diagnosis,” (laughs) “That’s what it is.” 

In many ways, my experience of diagnosing PMDD is very similar to my experience of my autism diagnosis because it was something that until I got to a point where we had found an intervention that gave me some space to learn more about what was going on, then I went and learned about it and I brought it to professionals and said, “Hey, look at this. What do you think? Like, am I reading this right?”

Because I’m not a medically trained person, right? So I can read the papers and I can say, “This seems to mimic my experience, but you know, what is your perception? What else should we be looking at?” My experience of PMDD was, I went through this awful time. Awful time that really affected my internal understanding of myself, and until I got treatment that fixed that, I had this idea that I was just a crap parent. I had these babies, I was falling apart, I was not focused, I was angry all the time, I was raging at them.

And obviously, when you’re the parent of kiddos who are challenging in any way, and I did have two neurodivergent kiddos, one who has a challenging temperament I would say and one who is the sweetest temperament, but had some delayed starts to things that made it harder to communicate with him when he was very young, and made it harder to build that parent-child relationship in the way that I had expected to get as a parent.

So my introduction to parenthood was really hard, and then on top of that to feel like I was a bad parent. Like not only am I not doing well by my kids who are struggling but also I’m angry at them all the time and I’m worried I’m going to hurt them. That really infected my internal sense of self-worth and sense of ability and understanding of who I was as a person.

To have treatment that was able to really help me separate out the strands of what is PMDD symptoms and what is actually me. Like, who am I versus what are my hormones doing for three days every month, right?

It really helped me crystallize and feel more confident and say, “No, this is me.” Like, “I am a good parent, I can do things. I have the skills and I can get the support I need when I’m not overtaken by these sets of symptoms associated with this disorder,” right?

The same thing happened to me with my autism diagnosis, right? I got my son’s autism diagnosis and then in researching that was like, “Oh, it’s me.” Went to the professionals said, “Hey, can you look at this,” received confirmation that it was the same thing. It was like trying to figure out, okay, it’s not that I’m failing (laughs), it’s that society doesn’t support me, right? And that to me was very similar to the PMDD experience, that I’d internalized all this stuff about how I wasn’t good enough when honestly I was more than good enough. I was working my butt off for my family, for myself, for my kids, and I just needed the right support to be able to access everything that’s good about me.

So that’s my PMDD story. I hope it’s helpful for somebody out there. If you’re experiencing something that sounds like this, don’t let doctors tell you it’s not important. Find other doctors. A lot of us, especially those of us— those of us who have a menstrual cycle are likely to be people who aren’t listened to by the large majority of the world. 

We deserve to be listened to, this is a significant portion of your life, and if you’re having symptoms that make it hard to interact with society in a normal way, to be a good parent, to be a good friend, to support and offer support to other people in the way that you want to please go get it checked out.

Like, read things, listen to podcasts, go talk to medical professionals. Get it handled because you deserve to have a life where you feel in authority of yourself, you feel in control of your emotions. You’re not crying for hours for no reason— like for literally no reason, right? Not like there’s some trauma in your past that you’re processing, but like there’s literally nothing wrong and your body is not doing what your brain wants it to do, right?

That’s really how it felt for me, and I don’t know if that’s what the dysmorphia piece of the PMDD means in the literature, but I can say for me it felt dysmorphic in that my sense of self was separate from my physical form in this universe like they were doing different things. And that felt so alienating and awful and I don’t want anyone to have to go through that. 

And the reason I bring it up and the reason I wanted to do this episode is to say that the research is showing us that it is more common for neurodivergent people who menstruate to also have PMDD, right? Just like many other co-occurring conditions that are more common in neurodivergent people. 

As far as I know, we don’t have a mechanism for that, we don’t know why that is. But that means that if you’re listening to this, if you’re here, you might be one of those folks or your kid might, or your sibling or your partner, right? And so it’s important to know whether you menstruate or not, whether you ever plan to menstruate or not, it’s important to know that someone in your life might be going through this, might be dealing with this, and probably doesn’t know what it’s called! Or that it exists or that it’s a quote, unquote “real” thing.

So I just, I really appreciate you listening to this, I hope it was helpful for you. I hope you’ll pass it on to folks that might need the information or want to hear a story about someone else who went through this and came out the other end. And now, I have been rage-attack-free for (laughs) eight years. Eight years, yeah. So treatment’s been really successful, I really hardly ever think of it anymore.

When Diane posted the article that they posted in the Autastic community, I was like, “Oh yeah! I have PMDD!” Like it hadn’t crossed my mind in years. Like, I take my medicine every evening and I just move on with my life, but it makes sense to me that it’s really tied up in my experience of being autistic and ADHD and it’s hard to tease all those things out. But if you get the name for one of the things you’re going through, it’s easier to get the names of all the other things you’re going through, too.

Thank you so much for being here today and for listening to this. If you liked this podcast, please consider leaving us a rating or throwing a couple of bucks in the pot at neurodiverging.com/donate. It’s really appreciated and helps out. And please remember, we are all in this together. 

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