Nicola: How HRT helps control my anxiety, weakness and vulnerability
First Minister speaks out in bid to ‘burst the stigma’ surrounding the menopause
FIRST Minister Nicola Sturgeon has revealed she has opted for hormone replacement therapy to combat the effects of the menopause.
In one of her most candid interviews yet about her personal life, she told Scots television presenter Kirsty Wark she had been taking HRT for the past four months after talking to her GP about feeling increased levels of ‘anxiety, weakness and vulnerability’.
Sitting down in Bute House with the Newsnight anchor for a one-off session for an online event organised by charity the Menopause Café, she said she had decided to speak publicly about her experience because she wanted to help ‘burst the stigma’ about something women had ‘no choice over’.
She said: ‘The menopause is so shrouded in mystery and stigma. It’s a stage of life yet we feel it is a weakness, and demonstrating that we are not as capable as we once were.
‘I’ve been to see the GP and I’ve been on HRT for the last four months. I think it’s starting to kick in because I’m starting to feel better. I don’t feel as rage-fuelled and I’m sleeping better, which is helping. One of the reasons I’ve decided to talk about it, and it’s not something that feels natural for me to do, is that if people like me don’t start talking about it, we will never burst this stigma.’
In April, during an appearance on ITV’s Loose Women show, Ms Sturgeon said she was in the ‘foothills’ of the menopause but felt nervous to speak out about the ‘intensely personal’ experience. She said she had been considering how she would cope given her public role.
Yesterday, she said she had experienced ‘terrifying moments’ in the debating chamber in Holyrood ‘when the cameras are on you and it’s being recorded for posterity and I’ll be mid-sentence and I’ll suddenly find myself thinking “do
‘A sense of not feeling yourself, discomfort’ ‘I starting think it’s to kick in because I’m starting to feel better. I don’t feel as rage-fuelled and I’m sleeping better
I know the word to say here or are am I going to forget it?”
‘There’s that sense of not feeling yourself all of a sudden and a general feeling of discomfort, as well as the lack of sleep, which is horrendous. There’s that sense of anxiety or having to suppress a bit of rage at the world all the time and, I suppose, for me, and many women will be experiencing this too, that sense of is what I’m experiencing the menopause or the symptoms of stress that come with doing a job like I do?
‘To distinguish between the two is really difficult. That sense of vulnerability and weakness, and so many women don’t want to show that in a job like mine.’
She added: ‘There are very few women who have been at the top of politics and of those who have been, if you think about Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton or Margaret Thatcher, they must have all gone through this and yet I can’t find anybody that has spoken about it.
‘And that would help me, if I could read something by somebody who had the same kind of anxieties I have about the very public nature of the job. If I want to learn about something I just go and read whatever I can find but, with the menopause, whatever I read just made it more confusing.
‘Part of what I started to experience and part of the anxiety was about “if I start to have any of these symptoms, such as brain fog, memory loss, flushing, and definitely if I start to talk about them and be open about them, people are going to say she can’t do her job”, which is not true for women in any job. What I’ve learned to do is try not to panic about it.’
The First Minister said she could understand women’s ‘real reticence’ to talk about it for fear of being discriminated against in the workplace and that ‘normalising’ the discussion on menopause, perhaps by including it during personal and social education lessons in school, might be helpful.
She added: ‘It’s about exposing girls and boys to it much earlier on, so it should become part of how we talk about life in the way girls will learn about periods and fertility.
‘We should be educating them about this stage of life. It will seem far in the future but it’s about normalising it for those of us approaching it or going through it.’