There used to be a running joke in my family. “Are you due on?”

my mum would ask, a smile resting on her face. She’d say it after witnessing one of my many meltdowns. But I wasn’t just snappy or bursting into tears at silly things, as so many of us do when our period is about to arrive. Instead, for over a decade, I was completely out of control of my own life – and no one knew why. How could they when I didn’t even know myself? I had a loving family, good friends, a fulfilling career. I should have been happy. But I wasn’t. The answer, it turns out, lay in Mum’s joke. My depression, anxiety, anorexia – they were all down to one thing: my menstrual cycle. So why did it take 14 years and countless overdoses for that to be diagnosed?