Breaking the Taboo of Menopause: Understanding the Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Turbulence of this Critical Life Transition for Women

FULL PROGRAMME

09:00 EDT
Introductions

09:10
Letticia Banton
Contextual Lens
From ‘witch hunt’ to ‘feminine forever’: the impact of history on why psychotherapy has been so silent on the menopause and where this leaves us as practicing therapists today.

09:30
Dr Margaret Altemus
The Biomedical Lens
The menopause transition is a time of psychological, social and physical development. A staged sequence of hormonal changes has been identified across the menopause transition. Physical symptoms that can emerge during perimenopause include vasomotor instability, weight gain, musculoskeletal pain, migraine and urogenital symptoms. During perimenopause there is also increased risk of new onset of depression, anxiety, suicidality, cognitive changes and psychotic symptoms. For women with a history of psychiatric disorders, symptoms can recur or be exacerbated during the menopause transition. A number of medical treatments for perimenopausal symptoms have been identified which can improve quality of life, but these treatments are under utilised. Treatment guidelines for hormone replacement therapy have shifted over the past 10 years to be less restrictive.

Learning Objectives:

• Explain the hormonal changes across the menopause transition and how they relate to physical symptoms of menopause, include vasomotor instability, weight gain, musculoskeletal pain, migraine and urogenital symptoms.
• Describe the effects of hormone changes across the menopause transition on mood and cognition in healthy women and women with psychiatric disorders
• Appraise risks and benefits of hormone replacement therapy for physical and mood symptoms associated with the menopause transition.

10.15
Q&A with Dr Margaret Altemus

10.30
Break

10.45
Sarah Benamer
Minding the Menopause – From Misogyny to Therapeutic Meaning Making
Historically wombs, menstrual cycles and concurrent hormones, have seen women ascribed madness, insatiability, untrustworthiness, and danger. Psychoanalytic theory has reflected this patriarchal paradigm in dissecting, demeaning, and scapegoating women’s bodies. We are either victim of our embodiment and apparently perpetrate the irrational and unexplainable because of them, or conversely our experience of the world through our inhabited physicality is shameful, to be ignored or subjugated to the male norm.  Nowhere is this more evident than regarding menopause as experienced by either client or therapist. Therapeutic attention to this aspect of women’s lives has been sparse, often imposing top-down misogynistic ideas that perpetuate the Cartesian split between psyche and soma rather than supporting women’s holistic meaning making including their body narratives. Sarah will consider the possibilities if we bring the hot flush in from the cold and seek to integrate both the physical and psychological experience of the menopause as part of, not set apart from psychoanalytic endeavour. Exploring what has informed therapeutic practice thus far and how we should widen the analytic lens to include the embodied and sociocultural to better understand and empower menopausal women living and loving in contemporary times.

Learning Objectives

• Integrate the unacknowledged often body-based narratives that women need support to name in therapy.
• Use menopausal themes and issues in therapy more generally with clients regardless of gender or age to normalize this issue.

11.30
Q&A with Sarah Benamer

11.45
Break

12.00
Jane Catherine Severn
Femenome: a psyche-logical approach to therapy with menopausal women
In the middle of every woman’s life comes – if she can allow it – a profoundly functionality-altering, status-quo disrupting developmental turbo-thrust. Alas, it is rarely acknowledged as such, and psychotherapy’s failure to be ablaze with curiosity about its mysterious manifestations risks leaving major revelatory doors unopened. This presentation will offer a radical re-cognition of the role of hormones in the mid-life expansion of women’s consciousness. Its psyche-logical model opens a whole new world of therapeutic potential, with custom-built diagnostic and remedial tools to ensure we align ourselves with, rather than against, the specifically menopausal developmental imperatives inherent in our clients.

Learning Objectives

• Identify any elements of cultural conditioning, prejudice, assumption or unawareness that could unconsciously limit or influence their work with menopausal clients
• Apply an understanding of female hormones as catalysts of consciousness and co-facilitators of therapy
• Discover a new psycho-spiritual model of specifically feminine human developmental maturation, in which the “symptoms” of menopause can be recognised as diagnostic and remedial guides in psychotherapy with menopausal clients (and in their own lives)

12.45
Q&A with Jane Catherine Severn

13.00
Panel Session with Q&A
Drawing on a multidisciplinary perspective to support clients through the menopause in psychotherapy

13:30
End