Menopause made me so forgetful I wanted to take dementia test, reveals Emma Freud
WHEN she noticed she was becoming forgetful, Emma Freud at first feared she was seriously ill.
The broadcaster, 58, asked to be tested for dementia after she couldn’t remember the word for stairs during a ‘humiliating’ brain fog. But her GP told her the memory loss was a symptom of the menopause she had gone through four years previously.
‘I went in and said, “I think you should test me for Alzheimer’s”,’ Miss Freud revealed. ‘And she said, “Are you menopausal?” and I went “Yeah” and she said “Well it’s that”.’
Miss Freud told The Shift podcast: ‘I went, “No, it can’t be that because it’s really serious”. But it is that because that’s one of the main symptoms.
‘And I said, “Look, I’m 58, I’m quite bright, I know about stuff to do with things like this, you can’t tell me that this is menopause.’
Miss Freud, daughter of the late broadcaster and MP Sir Clement Freud and great-granddaughter of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, said she was shocked to have reached that stage of her life and not known what the symptoms of the menopause were.
She said she had stopped talking to her family – she has four children aged 16 to 25 with comedy screenwriter Richard Curtis – when she lost the ability to articulate herself.
Miss Freud was alerted to the severity of her memory problems when she asked one of her children to fetch something for her but couldn’t remember the right words. ‘Because it was so humiliating to me I found myself not speaking rather than going through this ridiculous charades thing of trying to communicate what I wanted,’ she said.
‘And so I became lesser, I became smaller and quieter and littler because it was humiliating to myself that I had no idea how to do words out of my own mouth. And all I’ve ever done my entire life is do words out of my own mouth, it’s my job.’
Discovering that she was not suffering from dementia was a great relief.
‘It’s so much less awful when you know what it is... when you’re not thinking “Old people’s home for me, I’m on my way”,’ she said.
Radio 2 DJ Jo Whiley told the podcast last week that she took HRT in an attempt to cure herself of the ‘hideous brain fog’ caused by the menopause. She said: ‘Unless you experience it, it’s so hard, so intangible, just that awful thing of trying to remember stuff and it just fading away from your brain.
‘And you try and get hold of it and bring the thought back into your head to try to articulate it and you can’t.’