Trailer for a documentary titled "The M Factor: Shredding the Silence on Menopause" presenting personal testimony and clinician commentary about systemic neglect of menopause. Speakers describe minimal medical training on menopause, dismissive clinical responses, cognitive symptoms ("brain fog"), and elevated risks linked to early menopause (cardiovascular disease and dementia). The trailer links hormonal changes to mental-health effects, highlights racialized trauma as a factor, and emphasizes societal silence, economic costs (lost productivity and wages), and a call for greater awareness and research.
Chapters
I felt myself drawing into yourself and away from everyone because nobody understands. I'm a board certified obgyn, right? At an accredited program in this country. I got less than a month of training of menopause and some of my colleagues don't even get that. We were looking at the 20th anniversary of the reporting of the Women's Health Initiative and taking stock of what has happened in those 20 years. Very little.
We go through puberty and everybody's happy and excited and you can't wait. And then you go through pregnancy and it's, it's parties. You go through menopause and nobody wants to hear about it.
When I went to the doctor and told them that I diagnosed myself and I think this is happening, they said, well, we'll see. Let's just wait and see. Women who have early menopause have not only an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but also of dementia. So if something is bothering you and someone says it's in your head, it's like, of course it is. Everything is in my head. And hormones affect your brain.
Our brains run on estrogen starting at puberty, and they keep doing that until the end of our lives.
If you think about the impact of growing up in a racist society on your body, the trauma, it makes sense to me. Like as you get older, that trauma impacts your hormones. All of a sudden you get like heart fluctuations. And I thought, okay, it's just that I'm having a panic attack, you know, and so then that messes with your mental psyche, you know, all of it.
Brain fog is a very weird phenomenon that doesn't even actually have a term in medicine, is that these changes can be so severe to prompt fears of either going crazy or being developing dementia. Women say, I just don't feel like myself anymore. I feel like a completely. I'm just a different person.
Like, who is this person?
I've lost myself.
And so I lost a lot of the confidence in the one thing that I knew how to do. If I can't ad lib, if I can't read the teleprompter and the words that are in front of me, I can't be a journalist. We have the cost of lost work productivity, women with lost wages. This is an enormous loss of human capital. A lot of that was breast cancer. A lot of that is pregnancy related conditions. How much of that really is dedicated to women over the age of 40? You know, we can't even find it. They don't even keep records on how much research is done on menopausal women. That's how little has been done. I think one of the most damaging things we did to women is that we made them afraid of something their body naturally makes. I think it's devastating. Is the last third of my life not as important as the middle third in my reproductive years? I think that there is at least an understanding and awareness that women are not going to stand for it anymore. Women are waking up and saying what? No one ever told me this. Well, we should all know.
