Perimenopause and ADHD:

Perimenopause and ADHD: Why brain fog, not hot flushes, was the first sign

For years, doctors were trained to ask women about hot flushes and mood swings and call it perimenopause. Nobody was asking about brain fog, and nobody was joining the dots between fluctuating hormones and ADHD. Dr Helen Wall, GP and menopause specialist, found this out the hard way: through her own patients, her own daughter's ADHD diagnosis, and eventually through her own perimenopause.

The Instagram post that changed everything

Helen's perimenopause hit her brain before it hit anything else. She could manage the hot flushes and the aches. What floored her was losing the ability to function at work. When she asked her GP for help, she was told she was too young. She believed it, the way women are trained to, and pushed through for another six months before seeking private treatment. Not long after, she posted a single question on Instagram asking whether anyone else had noticed a link between hormones and ADHD. It reached thousands of women overnight, gynaecologists among them, many admitting the link was news to them too.

Medical misogyny and the endometriosis diagnosis gap

Helen and Emma talk openly about medical misogyny, including the uncomfortable fact that average time to an endometriosis diagnosis has risen past ten years rather than falling. They talk about why women's health keeps getting sliced into silos that ignore the whole person, and why that fragmentation costs women years of being dismissed.

You don't need a diagnosis to start understanding yourself

Helen is direct with her patients: don't put your life on pause waiting for a formal ADHD assessment. Identify with it, learn how your brain is wired, and start using the tools that help, long before a diagnosis arrives. Waiting years for an assessment should never mean waiting years to understand yourself.

The paradoxical progesterone reaction nobody explains

The conversation goes into real clinical detail: why some neurodivergent women have a paradoxical reaction to their own progesterone, why body identical hormones don't always mean body compatible, and why clinical curiosity has to guide practice while research funding catches up.

A photograph, and what it means to be believed

Helen closes by describing a photograph she keeps in her consultation room: her mother, a midwife and lifelong advocate for women, who died before Helen qualified. It's what she looks at on the hardest days. In its way, it's the whole episode in one image.

If you've ever been told your experience is normal, that you're too young, or that it's all in your head, this episode is for you.