Hormonal: How Hormones Drive Desire, Shape Relationships, and Make Us Wiser

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We must insist on trauma-informed care which focuses on listening to and helping women on their own terms, rather than attaching a label which provokes hate and disdain from even psychiatric staff and has led many a woman to suicide.

Since I was a small child I have delighted in the details of a natural world: veins in the sand at low tide, the tiny silver bobbies and yellow cups in patches of lichen, the hot velvet of a horse's nose, the handsome redness of a rosehip, the baby's shoulder like fuzz on a fig leaf stem.

However, with either men or women, it is clearly untrue to claim that our hormones have no impact on our behavior, and while it is also true that you can generally use your rational judgement to keep hormones from driving your actions, that is a lot harder to do if you are kept unaware of what those hormones are driving you to do (or not do). She appeared to take her trousers down, unwrap the tampon’s packaging, position her body and push the thing up herself in one dainty movement. Edgar Berman, who in 1970 was a member of the Democratic National Party's Committee on National Priorities, and said "Suppose we had a President in the White House, a menopausal woman president who had to make the decision of the Bay of Pigs, which of course was a bad one, or the Russian contretemps with Cuba at the time? We don't exactly know what caused PMS, but cyclical ovarian activity and the effect of estradiol and progesterone on the neurotransmitters serotonin and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) appear to be key factors.

The body keeps the score - Bessel Van Der Kolk and "The shaking woman or A history of my nerves" - Siri Hustvedt deepened my wonder about the relationship between mind and body, feeding my ongoing inner question: can we really separate the two? Notably, after my period, I’d have a week of feeling almost fantastic: productive, calm, resilient, porous to all the smell and colour of life. I might have said, “and I am not threatened nor repulsed by seeing myself as a animal in the kingdom of other living beings that I share the earth with”, the point she is making is we must stop with the denial of our biology, our shared ancestry with other primates, our out of control behavior that threatens the entire future of the planet or said another way, “we're just monkeys folks. A few days earlier we’d been in a four- man tent in Southwold and I’d sat by the zip feeling a peculiar nostalgia, or longing, that I couldn’t place. One of the funniest things about the show is that you find often find yourself wanting to be, kiss, or at least admire Villanelle, in spite of all the throat-slitting, shooting, and watching-people's-last-breaths-with-a-child-like-smile-on-your-face stuff.He understood shell shock as a form or hysteria that had affected all these men and was very clear that the officers did not suffer from hysteria, nearly as much as the soldiers. The MBTI might seem to offer one of those easy answers, yet no binary test could ever capture the variability of human beings. Aside from all the physical symptoms, the idea that the sadness and anhedonia of PMS are my underlying moods, merely revealed by hormones, is not something I've reconciled myself to. It is the world's most widely administered "psychological" test estimated to be taken by millions each year.

Eleanor Morgan's "Hormonal" is "a conversation about women's bodies, mental health and why we need to be heard". We non- starters used to ask each other how bad it could be, because we all knew what a stomach ache felt like. Yet beneath the tentative conversations of liberation, the bottle is still full of mystery, ignorance and stigma regarding our bodies. It is a medical approach she takes, not anthropological or even all that sociological and while she does mention Stephen Jay Gould, she does not mention some of the classic zoological and anthropological accounts of human primate behavior, one of the first being the very daring and audacious book for its time (1967), The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris in which Morris explains human sexual behavior from a biologist's perspective based on evolutionary principles—again, in 1967!

This is hormonal and maybe it doesn't even qualify as arrogance but the necessary demonstration of fit genes.