At age 40, you were an extremely capable person with a loving husband, two beautiful children and a career in community development, where you were supporting many others. What was it that suddenly shook this stable life you had created?
That is probably one of the hardest things to explain, because from the outside my life looked incredibly stable. I was 40 years old. I had a husband I loved, two beautiful children, a career that meant a great deal to me, and I had spent much of my working life supporting other people and strengthening communities.
I was the capable one. I was the organiser. I was the person people came to when something needed to be sorted out.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, I stopped sleeping.
It sounds almost too simple when you say it like that, but the insomnia was relentless. It wasn’t just having a bad night’s sleep or waking up a few times. My brain seemed to lose its ability to switch off.
And when you don’t sleep properly night after night, everything starts to change.
Initially, I didn’t recognise myself as becoming mentally unwell. I thought I had a sleep problem. But gradually I became increasingly anxious and distressed. My thinking changed. I couldn’t function in the way I always had.
That was incredibly frightening because there wasn’t an obvious reason for it.
I hadn’t experienced some catastrophic event that explained why my mental health had suddenly deteriorated so dramatically. I had a good life. I loved my family. I had things to look forward to. Yet I was becoming incredibly unwell.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that my body was changing. Perimenopause wasn’t even on my radar.
Looking back, I think that is one of the most important parts of my story: I didn’t know what was happening to me, and neither did the people treating me.
We know a lack of sleep can have very profound effects on mental health. When you initially presented to a doctor with insomnia, what happened?
When I first sought medical help, I went because I wasn’t sleeping.
I wasn’t presenting saying, “I have a severe mental illness.” I was saying, essentially, “Something is wrong. I can’t sleep.”
From there, things escalated very quickly. I was prescribed sleeping tablets initially, which did nothing, and then, as my mental health continued to deteriorate, there were more medications and different medications. I saw different doctors and psychiatrists.
I desperately wanted something to work because I was exhausted and frightened. But rather than getting better, I continued to deteriorate. What became really difficult was that the focus increasingly became psychiatric: What mental illness did I have? What medication might treat it? What psychiatric intervention did I need?
There didn’t seem to be enough curiosity about the question I now think was so important:
Why had a previously well 40-year-old woman suddenly stopped sleeping and become so profoundly psychologically unwell?
I wish someone had looked at the whole picture, my age, my symptoms, my medical history, my hysterectomy, my history of severe endometriosis and the possibility of hormonal change.
Instead, we entered this cycle of trying to manage the psychiatric symptoms while the underlying question of why this was happening remained unanswered.
You were prescribed a series of medications, saw multiple psychiatrists and were twice admitted to Peacock House. None of these treatments worked and you spiralled further into psychological distress. Can you describe what this period was like for you and your family?
It was devastating. There really isn’t another word for it. I went from being somebody who was independent, capable and incredibly involved in my family, my work and my community to somebody who could barely function.
I was admitted to Peacock House twice, and there were medications, appointments and psychiatrists, but nothing seemed to stop what was happening. In fact, at different points I became significantly worse. My world became smaller and smaller.
And while I was the person experiencing the illness, my whole family was living it with me. My husband suddenly had a wife he barely recognised. My children had a mum who had always been there for them and suddenly couldn’t be the mum I had always been.
That is something I still find incredibly emotional to talk about. When we talk about severe mental illness, we often talk about the individual patient. But there is a family standing around that person.
My husband was trying to keep our family functioning while also trying to keep me safe. He was trying to understand something that none of us understood. My children were watching their mum disappear in front of them. And I knew that.
That’s one of the cruellest things about it. There were moments when I was aware of what this was doing to the people I loved most, but I didn’t have the capacity to simply pull myself out of it.
I think that’s important for people to understand. You can’t just decide to “snap out of” severe psychological distress. I desperately wanted my old life back. I desperately wanted to be Mel again. But I couldn’t find her.
In 2016 you had a hysterectomy due to severe endometriosis. Your body had already experienced significant hormonal disruption, and because of that history there was every possibility you could enter perimenopause earlier than expected. You and others raised whether hormones could be contributing to what was happening to your brain and nervous system. What was the response?
This is one of the parts of my story that I find most frustrating. I’d had a hysterectomy in 2016 because of severe endometriosis. My ovaries were retained, so I could still experience the hormonal changes of perimenopause even though I no longer had periods as an obvious sign that things were changing.
During my illness, the possibility of hormones was raised. But it wasn’t properly investigated. And that is something I keep coming back to: why wasn’t perimenopause part of the differential diagnosis?
I was a woman around 40 experiencing sudden and profound changes in sleep, anxiety, mood, cognition and psychological wellbeing. Why weren’t we looking at hormones alongside psychiatric explanations?
I don’t say that to blame individual doctors. I met people who genuinely wanted to help me.
For me, this is about a gap in knowledge and a gap in the system. Women’s health and mental health cannot exist in completely separate boxes because hormones affect the brain.
I wish someone had said much earlier:
“Before we assume this is purely psychiatric, could hormonal change be contributing to what is happening here?”
That one question might have changed the trajectory of my life.
With nothing working, your thoughts became darker. What happened next?
Eventually I reached a point where I couldn’t see a way out. I had become so unwell and so disconnected from the person I had always been that I began experiencing suicidal thoughts. That’s difficult to talk about because I had a husband I loved. I adored my children.
People sometimes struggle to reconcile those two things: How can somebody who loves their family think about ending their life?
But for me, it wasn’t about not loving my family. It was about being in such profound psychological pain that my brain could no longer see another way for that pain to stop.
Eventually I became so unwell that I required hospital treatment and was placed under the Mental Health Act. I went from being a completely independent woman who made decisions for herself, her family and through her work, to having decisions made about me because I was considered too unwell to make them myself.
That loss of autonomy was enormous. But I also understand now that the people around me were desperately trying to keep me alive.
At that stage we weren’t talking about thriving or getting my career back. We were trying to keep me here.
When you are so used to being the capable, competent one, what is it like to suddenly become the patient under constant watch?
It completely strips away your sense of identity. I had spent my adult life being independent. I managed teams, programs, a household and family. I was somebody other people relied upon.
Suddenly I was the patient.
I was being observed. I wasn’t free to simply make my own decisions. Other people were assessing my risk and determining what happened next. There is a vulnerability in that which is very difficult to describe unless you have experienced it.
You stop being Mel, the mum, wife, friend, colleague, community worker, and you become a patient with symptoms. And when you’re already psychologically unwell, losing that sense of autonomy can make you feel even further removed from yourself.
One thing my experience has taught me is how important dignity is in mental-health care. Even when somebody is extremely unwell, there is still a person there. They still have a history, relationships, strengths and a life outside that hospital room.
I think that’s something I carry with me now whenever I hear somebody else’s story. I know what it feels like to be on the other side.
Your treatment involved seven rounds of Electroconvulsive Therapy. When you finally returned to your family home at Christmas of 2024, how had you and your life changed?
By that point I had undergone seven rounds of ECT. Coming home should have felt like the end of the story. But it wasn’t.
I was alive, and I was home with my family, and obviously that mattered enormously. But I didn’t simply walk through the front door and become the person I had been before all of this happened.
There had been an enormous trauma.
My confidence had gone. My sense of who I was had been shaken. I had gone from being an independent, capable woman to experiencing one of the most frightening periods imaginable.
And my family had experienced that trauma too. We all had to recover. There was also the question that still hadn’t been answered:
Why had this happened to me?
I think that’s what made it so difficult.
After all the appointments, medications, hospital admissions, psychiatrists and seven rounds of ECT, we still didn’t really understand why a previously functioning 40-year-old woman had suddenly become so catastrophically unwell.
I needed more than simply being discharged. I needed an explanation.
I needed to understand what had happened to my brain and my body. And I needed some hope that this wasn’t going to define the rest of my life.
Despite seeing a long line of medical professionals, none of them had joined the dots and discovered the cause of what you were going through. How did a conversation with a counsellor in January 2025 change that?
That conversation changed everything. I shared my story with a counsellor and she listened to the whole story rather than looking at one symptom in isolation.
And she said words to the effect of:
“This sounds like perimenopause.”
It was such a simple statement. But after everything I had been through, somebody was finally looking at the entire picture and asking whether hormones could explain what had happened.
That led me down a completely different path and eventually to Dr Hannah Chapman, who specialises in women’s health. For the first time, there was an explanation that actually made sense of so many pieces of the puzzle. And there was enormous validation in that.
It wasn’t about saying that everything I’d experienced wasn’t real. The mental-health symptoms were absolutely real. The distinction was understanding that there could be a biological driver contributing to those psychiatric symptoms.
That is hugely important.
Perimenopause isn’t simply hot flushes and periods changing. Hormonal fluctuations can affect sleep, mood, anxiety, cognition and psychological wellbeing. And because I’d had a hysterectomy, I didn’t have changing periods as that obvious signal telling me I was entering a different hormonal stage.
Looking back, there were clues. They simply weren’t joined together. That’s why I tell this story now.
There may be a lot of people unaware of the interplay between hormones and mental health and how perimenopause can mimic serious mental illnesses. What would you like to see done to raise this awareness and ensure your experience is not repeated?
This is ultimately why I speak publicly about something that is incredibly personal.
I can’t change what happened to me. I can’t give my family those months back. I can’t erase the hospital admissions, the medications, the fear or the seven rounds of ECT. But I can use what happened to me to try to make the system better for the woman who comes after me.
I would like to see much greater education about perimenopause across general practice, psychiatry, psychology, counselling and acute mental-health services.
When a woman in her late 30s, 40s or 50s presents with a sudden onset of insomnia, anxiety, depression, cognitive changes or significant changes in psychological wellbeing, I want clinicians to at least ask:
“Could hormones be part of this picture?”
That doesn’t mean assuming every mental-health problem in a woman is caused by perimenopause and menopause. It means considering the whole person. It means women’s health and mental health talking to each other. I’d also like women themselves to have better information.
For so long we’ve been given this incredibly narrow picture of menopause: hot flushes, night sweats and periods stopping. That wasn’t my experience. My first major warning sign was that my brain stopped letting me sleep.
I want women, and their partners and families, to know that psychological symptoms can be part of the perimenopausal transition and that significant changes deserve proper investigation.
I also want women to feel confident asking questions.
If something doesn’t feel right, keep asking. If you’ve experienced a dramatic change in your mental health without an obvious explanation, ask whether hormonal factors should be considered alongside other possible causes.
And finally, I want us to listen to lived experience. I am not a doctor, and I never pretend to be one. I’m simply the woman who lived through this.
I know what it was like to go from being a capable, happy 40-year-old mum and community worker to being so psychologically unwell that I was hospitalised and underwent ECT.
And I know what it was like to eventually have somebody ask the question that should have been asked much earlier.
That’s why I’m sharing my story.
Because if telling it means that one woman, one husband, one family, one GP, one psychiatrist or one counsellor hears it and thinks, “Could this be perimenopause?”, then perhaps another family won’t have to travel quite as far down the road that mine did.
And for me, that’s how I make something meaningful out of something that was otherwise an incredibly painful period of our lives.
A Strong Final Thought
The woman who became so unwell in 2024 was still me. I hadn’t disappeared. I was a mum, a wife, a professional and a person who loved her life. Something profound was happening in my brain and body, and we didn’t understand it.
Today I’m incredibly grateful to be able to stand on the other side of that experience and talk about it. I don’t share my story because I want people to feel sorry for me. I share it because women’s stories can change systems. If mine helps another woman get the right questions asked earlier, then something powerful can come from what my family and I went through.”