PMS is a ‘myth’, claims female psychologist

Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is widely thought to affect most women at some point in their lives.

Sufferers can experience a combination of mood swings, bloating, breast pain and a low sex drive, with the NHS claiming that one in 20 women will have symptoms severe enough to stop them from carrying out day-to-day tasks.

However, now one female psychologist has claimed that it’s all a myth, arguing that PMS is simply an example of modern women struggling to manage their lives.

Robyn Stein DeLuca believes that women have been fed lies by books, magazines and the medical community regarding the validity of PMS and its crippling symptoms.

“We internalise this idea that our bodies must be faulty,” she told Mail Online.

“It’s more likely that women feel overwhelmed.”

According to DeLuca, many of the symptoms women credit to PMS – cramps, bloating and feeling depressed – are probably signs that they are simply pushing themselves too hard.

Saying that it’s PMS is like using a “get-out-of-jail-free card,” she says.

In her provocative new book, The Hormone Myth: How Junk Science, Gender Politics And Lies About PMS Keep Women Down, the life coach and Ted speaker debunks the long-standing “myths” surrounding the effect of female hormones.

While DeLuca admits that hormones can cause unpleasant symptoms, she claims that they are not severe enough to be so inhibiting, adding that “everyone feels those things some of the time.”

However, Joyce Harper, a women's health professor at UCL, strongly disagrees.

“Hormonal changes affect our mood – it is not a myth," she told The Independent.

"About 95 per cent of women experience PMS at some time. We are not all feeling ‘overwhelmed’. I totally disagree that ‘is really just evidence of modern women struggling under the burden of trying to have — and do — it all’. We have not invented PMS," she said.

It’s not the first time researchers have speculated the validity of PMS.

A similar theory circulated in 2012 after a controversial Gender Medicine study claimed that "PMS may not exist."

Researchers at the University of Toronto conducted analysis on 41 studies that examined women’s moods in line with their menstrual cycles and found that only one in six studies had proven links between mood swings and the premenstrual period.

However, the NHS insisted that their findings should be viewed with caution, as many of the studies they looked at had very small sample sizes which showed a lack of “statistical rigour.”

They concluded that this particular study seemed “more of an opinion piece than an example of significant medical research.”