What Happened With Lori? There is a moment I have witnessed many times across my many years of clinical practice — a moment when a woman sitting across from me hears, perhaps for the first time, a coherent explanation for what she has been experiencing. Her face shifts. Relief and disbelief arrive together, as if they have been waiting just outside the door. This is what happened with Lori. She came to me at forty-five — severely depressed, highly anxious, unable to sleep, an

What inspired you to write The Fifth Decade: Is It Just My Life or Is It Perimenopause? I became inspired to write The Fifth Decade when I saw women struggling with the perimenopausal transition without the benefit of understanding what was happening to them. There was some information available on the physiological changes women experience, but too many people thought of menopause as something that happens to older women and is primarily about hot flashes. Women, and their f

"Why am I here?" he asked. "Are you asking why you are alive?" I responded. For ninety-seven years, her father had been a man of action, not words. Emotions lived in what she came to think of as his vault—a place so deeply protected that even he seemed to have forgotten the combination. He was stoic, traditional, someone who showed love through providing and protecting, not through emotional expression. Then The Thief arrived; a relentless degenerative illness that systematic