‘It was like PMS on acid – I wanted to die’

Eric Clapton’s daughter Ruth reveals how premenstrual dysphoric disorder made her feel like she was going mad for half of every month

A year and a half ago, I typed seven words into Google. A few clicks later, and what showed on my screen described me exactly. The result filled me with relief, but also panic. What came next?

I had typed “hormone problems in 37-year-old woman”. Before you yawn and look away, these were real problems. For half of every month, I felt as if I were going mad. I was so tired I could barely get out of bed – and normally I’m someone who’s up at 7am, breakfast ready, uniforms laid out, sometimes even with a workout already done.

But for half the month, when I had to get up to take my kids to school, I’d do it at the last possible minute, in a rush, and some days I’d drop them at school and just come home and go straight back to bed – which is so not like me.

I was paranoid, grumpy and easily angered. I would react to things in a way I knew wasn’t appropriate, especially with my children, but I couldn’t stop myself doing it. Most frightening of all, I was experiencing suicidal ideation – knowing I wasn’t really going to kill myself, but thinking about it, often, and knowing that if I could do it in a way where nobody else got to be hurt and I wouldn’t be in too much pain, then I’d just flick that switch. It was awful.

And it didn’t make sense. My mum suggested I was depressed, but this wasn’t depression. I was happily divorced from the father of my two children – a divorce I’d instigated myself. The kids were happy at school; I worked out four or five times a week; I ate healthily. And besides, when you’re depressed, it’s all the time. Which wasn’t the case for me.

It had taken me about a year to realise my symptoms were linked to my menstrual cycle. I’d noticed that it was always around the time of my period that I felt like this – then my period would start and I’d feel about a million times better, as if I’d woken up from a nightmare.

What had come up on my computer screen after I typed in those words proved I wasn’t going mad. Instead, it appeared that I might be suffering with something called premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. A severe form of premenstrual syndrome (PMS)

– it’s like PMS on acid, to be honest – it affects about one in 20 women.

Symptoms include headaches and joint pain, trouble sleeping and yes, mental and emotional symptoms, such as feeling anxious, angry, depressed or even suicidal. I carried on researching and booked a doctor’s appointment.

My GP was amazing. For a start, she recognised PMDD as a thing, something that I was later to find was quite unusual. I already knew that going on the contraceptive pill was one option, but the GP said that wasn’t appropriate for me. I was a smoker at the time, so there was a high risk of stroke.

Antidepressants were another option. I’d never taken them, and wasn’t keen to start, but I had discovered it was also an option to take them for just two weeks a month, the fortnight of the madness. The doctor wasn’t so keen on that option, but said she’d prefer me to do that than nothing, so she put me on sertraline, an SSRI or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

I took it for two months; it was awful. I’m an enthusiastic person, but the sertraline put me on a single level of emotion all the time.

I’d already suggested to the doctor, from my research, that a hormone gel might be an option, but the response from her was if I wanted to do that I’d need to go private. So I booked a private consultation with a hormone clinic, and was prescribed a synthetic form of oestrogen, made of yams.

It was great: I used to use it two or three times a day in the twoweek madness stage, rubbing it on my legs. I still had to track my cycle, to know when to use it, but it made such a difference.

But the gel was costing me £50 a throw, and I wanted to know if there was another option. My periods, which had always been regular as clockwork, had become much shorter – down to about two days a month – and much heavier.

I’d started to worry I was no longer fertile. I’m not saying I want more children, but I’m still young enough, single and I’m dating younger guys who might want to start a family.

There have also been some situations where I’ve had unprotected sex and there have been no scares whatsoever – whereas back in my 20s, I just had to walk past someone on the stairs and I’d fall pregnant (in fact, I’ve had four terminations).

This was my health, and we live in a country that supposedly has a National Health Service. I wanted to know the NHS had what I needed. So I made another doctor’s appointment.

This time round, my experience wasn’t so positive. For a start, this GP had never even heard of PMDD – she had to google it – which is pretty astonishing when I’d been diagnosed with it in the same surgery. Then she just said I should go back on antidepressants.

I told her it wasn’t depression, it was a hormone imbalance. I suggested that perhaps I was perimenopausal. She asked if I was still having periods, but didn’t seem to care that they now last only two days.

She prescribed me the pill (I don’t smoke anymore), which I guess has got oestrogen in it, so maybe it’ll help – although it will also stop my periods, so if I were to go through the menopause I might not even know. And that’s not at all what I want.

The whole situation has made me so angry. I feel I’m made out to be just another whiny woman.

Why didn’t the GP ask about my family history? If she had, perhaps she’d have discovered that my mum started taking HRT when she was 38 for this very same reason, after her two older sisters had no end of problems. Mum now thinks they all suffered from PMDD. And yet little is known about it, and the treatment options are so limited: it’s basically just antidepressants.

There appears to be no interest in finding out if PMDD affects fertility – all the doctors seem to care about is whether you’re going to get pregnant accidentally.

How can that be a good thing, especially when antidepressants come with all sorts of side effects of their own, including permanent sexual dysfunction?

I’m now in the process of finding a private specialist who might be able to help me. It’s expensive: £250 for a consultation, £250 for a blood test. I’m lucky I have the finances to do that. What about all those other women out there? It’s confusing to me that the medicine is available but we’re not using it more broadly, we’re just sticking women on antidepressants or the Pill.

Yet, according to a study carried out last year, 593,600 of us in the UK with PMDD will experience suicidal ideation, 412,000 will self-harm and 275,000 will attempt suicide. About 31 million women and girls worldwide have PMDD. That’s an awful lot of distressed women.

However, as a new review of global studies published in January found, there is little training around PMDD for either psychiatrists or medical students, and GPs’ knowledge is also very variable (as I found), which means patients fall through the gaps.

“We need better awareness and training for health professionals about this debilitating but highly treatable condition,” said Dr Thomas Reilly, of Oxford University’s psychiatry department, who led the study.

Hear, hear. I can only hope that his report is widely read, and that something is done about it. Until then, I and many other women will continue to feel as if we’re going mad every month.

As told to Lucy Denyer

The medicine is available but instead we’re sticking women on antidepressants

Angry: Ruth Clapton says she was made to feel like ‘just another whiny woman’ by her GP