Female attitudes to menopause

The universal phenomenon of climacterium in women has received little attention from psychiatrists, except in the case of extreme emotional reactions, the “involutional psychoses”. This study was intended to explore the responses of a broad range of women to the changes of climacterium. As a pilot study, it was guided only by the general expectation that a woman's response to menopause would be influenced by her response to earlier psychosexual events. Fifty-five women of diverse ethnic origins participated in semistructured psychiatric interviews. The interview focused on the subject's attitude toward her femininity, her psychosexual history, menopause, and toward the family and social problems associated with this age. Response to menopause was coded on a three-point ordinal scale, ranging from “mixed-positive” to “mixed-negative”. The association of 11 independent variables to the response to menopause was tested for the population as a whole and controlling for ethnicity. Of the 11 independent variables, only one was associated with a positive response to menopause: a lack of desire for additional children, among the Oriental-Arab group. Categories in 9 of the 11 independent variables tend to be associated with a negative attitude toward menopause; but the pattern of association does not support our general expectation that a history of successful response to earlier psychosexual experiences is predictive of a positive response to menopause. Our findings, though drawn from a small sample, indicate that this relationship is more complex than is generally suggested.