Davina McCall says ‘menopause made me feel frightened and invisible’

Davina McCall has said going through menopause made her feel “invisible” and “frightened” as she revealed she did not tell anyone she was struggling.

The TV presenter argued going through the menopause involves a “grieving process” and a feeling of “shame” that the menopause is making you older.

In the UK, the majority of the 3.4 million women aged between 50 and 64 will be experiencing symptoms of the menopause – with these ranging from heart palpitations to hot flushes, vaginal pain, changes in mood and more.

Speaking at a Q&A in central London on Monday evening, McCall explained taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) profoundly improved her menopausal symptoms.

Her comments come as the UK is currently grappling with an acute shortage of HRT, which is a treatment that massively improves debilitating physical and psychological symptoms of the menopause.

Addressing a crowd in a panel discussion after a screening of her new Channel 4 documentary on the menopause, McCall said “HRT shortages are unacceptable” and she hoped they would be resolved soon.

The 54-year-old also explained HRT improved her “confidence in a huge way” and made her feel like she had got herself back.

“It was like being reborn,” McCall, who talked about going through the menopause in a Channel 4 documentary last year, added.

The former Big Brother presenter, who began her menopause journey when she was 44-years-old, also told the crowd going through the menopause made her “feel invisible” as well as “frightened” as she did not know what was “happening to me”.

“I stepped back even further, diminished myself,” McCall added.

The presenter, who has a new documentary called Davina McCall: Sex, Mind and the Menopause which airs on Channel 4 on 2 May at 9pm, explained HRT helps Alzheimer’s, dementia, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s.

“This a big piece of research that hopefully, people will listen to in this country. This research has been out there for a while and we haven’t known about it,” McCall said.

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She said if women decide to take HRT, they should do so as soon as their menopausal symptoms start as she hit out at the societal expectation for women to simply “soldier on”.

“That is what we have been taught to do, what we have been brought up to do as a woman,” McCall, who is currently writing a book called Menopausing, added.

After filming the first documentary, the presenter explained she initially feared it may have been “the biggest mistake of my life”, but was then overwhelmed by the positive responses she received after the documentary was released.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) estimates more than one million women in the UK are currently dependent on some form of HRT.

While the UK has been hit with a nationwide shortage of HRT as a consequence of manufacturing and supply issues since 2019, the deficit has ramped up significantly in scale in recent weeks.