There is something I have observed throughout my years of clinical practice that I believe every woman in her forties — and the people who love her — deserves to understand. The emotional upheaval so many women experience during this decade is not a response to their lives falling apart. In most cases, it is a response to a profound hormonal transition that no one warned them was coming. What Is Actually Happening Perimenopause can begin as early as the late thirties. Many

Why You Are Not Falling Apart. I want to tell you something that women reaching their mid-forties need to hear. What you are experiencing has a name. It has a physiological explanation. And it does not mean you are falling apart.

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