Woollett's PMDD Memoir Exposes Medical Gaps and Wellness Misinformation

Laura Elizabeth Woollett's new memoir, Hell Days, arrives at a moment when premenstrual dysphoric disorder is finally getting attention. PMDD—a severe form of premenstrual syndrome affecting about 5.5% of people with menstrual cycles—was only officially recognized as a psychiatric diagnosis in 2013. For Woollett, who was formally diagnosed in 2019 in her mid-twenties, that recognition came after years of symptoms that included planning her own death, only to find the despair lift once her period began. A woman doctor specializing in women's health caught what others had missed, prescribing an oral contraceptive that changed the trajectory of her life. Without that diagnosis, Woollett writes, she might have spent decades cycling through misdiagnosis and medication after medication.

Woollett's book is not a simple personal account. It weaves memoir with research, interviews, and historical investigation—part detective story, part thesis. She traces the politics embedded in women's health itself, beginning with the development of the oral contraceptive pill. While trials for a male contraceptive were halted because of side effects like mood swings and acne, the female pill was tested on women in Puerto Rico during the 1950s under far more dangerous conditions, with three women dying during the trials. This history matters because it sits at the intersection of feminist bodily autonomy, racism, classism, and medical misogyny. Woollett explores it not as abstract history but as context for her own hesitation about taking medication—and for understanding why so many people with PMDD remain skeptical of pharmaceutical solutions.

The condition itself is brutal. In the week before menstruation, people with PMDD may become withdrawn, irritable, exhausted, depressed—symptoms severe enough to interfere with ordinary life. One passage Woollett quotes captures the sensory intensity: "All perceptions are irritants. Smells are stronger. Dirt dirtier. Flesh fleshier." For those living with it, the experience can feel like inhabiting a different neurological state. Woollett also explores premenstrual exacerbation, where hormonal changes before menstruation worsen existing conditions like ADHD, autism, or trauma responses. Women with ADHD, she notes, are three times more likely to have PMDD—a connection many clinicians still miss.

The gaps in medical knowledge remain striking. Woollett interviews psychiatry professor Tory Eisenlohr-Moul, a leading PMDD expert and former chair of the International Association of Premenstrual Disorders clinical advisory board. Eisenlohr-Moul calls it "amazing" that PMDD exists as a diagnosis at all, yet points to a fundamental problem: the diagnostic criteria exclude people whose symptoms don't completely resolve, or who have other psychiatric symptoms alongside PMDD. A gynaecologist at the University of New South Wales told Woollett about a phone call with a psychiatric registrar at a public hospital. The registrar had just realized that a 24-year-old patient with multiple suicide attempts was arriving at the hospital during her period. The registrar asked, almost as an afterthought, whether that might be relevant. The gynaecologist's response was wordless disbelief.

Woollett's own experience with medication illustrates the complexity. After starting one brand of contraceptive pill, she felt energized and alive—possibly manic, she later reflects. But she was also intensely thirsty, drinking liters of water, waking drenched in sweat. Then one morning she woke too sick to work. By afternoon her husband rushed her to the hospital. Her brain swelled. Doctors worried about meningoencephalitis. She developed pneumonia and spent a week in an ICU coma. When she asked whether the pill could have caused it, the question was dismissed. Only later did the doctor who originally diagnosed her PMDD acknowledge that Woollett may have experienced one of those "one in a million" side effects listed in the fine print. The experience captures a deeper problem: medications can help people with PMDD, but they don't always work, and the risks are real.

Meanwhile, misinformation flourishes online. Woollett documents the rise of cycle-syncing—a blend of pseudoscience and mystical notions of the "divine feminine" promoted by wellness influencers. As of May 2026, she writes, there were 221,000 posts under #cyclesyncing on Instagram and 105,000 on TikTok, with cumulative views in the hundreds of millions. These accounts promote dietary, activity, and spiritual practices aligned with menstrual phases, selling products and services based on faux biology. The movement has become entangled with tradwife aesthetics, far-right ideology, and essentialist gender notions. The appeal is understandable: people suffering want a non-medical solution, something that doesn't require swallowing pills or confronting the politics of their own bodies.

Yet the stakes are undeniable. People with PMDD are seven times more likely to attempt suicide and twice as likely to die by suicide than people assigned female at birth without the condition. For some portion of each month, some people are living in what Woollett describes as hell. The challenge, as she frames it, is navigating between two impossible positions: the desire not to emphasize hormonal sensitivity (which can reinforce harmful stereotypes about women's emotional instability) and the urgent reality that people are suffering and dying. Woollett's memoir refuses easy answers. Instead, it holds the complexity—the history, the science, the politics, the lived experience—and asks readers to sit with it.