Women use PMS as ‘get-out-of-jail-free card’: expert

MOST women are thought to have been affected at some point in their lives by premenstrual syndrome, which can cause symptoms such as mood swings, bloating and breast tenderness.

According to Monash University 90 per cent of women experience at least one symptom each month and some women can be affected so severely that it impedes their day-to-day life.

But one female psychologist has claimed that PMS is nothing but a myth that women use as an “excuse for when they need a break”.

Robyn Stein DeLuca, a research assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University in New York, believes the severe effects of PMS have been exaggerated through the media and

the medical community. In reality, women were just feeling overwhelmed with their busy lives, she said. In her book, The Hormone Myth: How junk science, gender politics and lies about PMS keep

women down, DeLuca claimed there was scientific evidence backing up her beliefs that hormones don’t impact woman as much as they are led to believe.

She said because modern women have so many extra responsibilities — using the examples of work, taking care of families, monitoring others’ health and making Christmas dinner — they felt like failures if they couldn’t do all of these things.

So they use PMS “like a getout-of-jail-free card”, DeLuca said.

However, there are many other health professionals that strongly disagree, such as women’s health professor Joyce Harper who said it was a fact that hormonal changes affect mood.

“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’,” she told The

Independent. “We have not invented PMS.”