![]() ![]() There have been a spate of mental health confessionals since Prince Harry led the way last month, describing how the death of his mother in 1997 nearly led to a breakdown. It was on Lorraine Kelly’s ITV morning show this week that Carol first admitted she was driven to the brink of suicide by depression directly linked to depletion in her hormones. It is her hope to raise awareness of this in a TV documentary, and to press NHS doctors to prescribe it routinely, to prevent future generations - her 25-year-old daughter specifically - from suffering the way she did. Many psychiatrists also fail to differentiate between clinical and hormonal depression, and treat both with psychotherapy, Carol believes, when the answer could lie with bio-identical HRT. ‘For me they would have been the last resort.’ ‘Antidepressants may attack the symptoms but they do not solve the problem,’ says Carol. Instead, they opt for the cheaper HRT (derived from pregnant mare’s urine) to assuage physical symptoms, and rely on antidepressants to deal with mental ones. ![]() ![]() Yet NHS doctors are loath to prescribe these bio-identical hormones either to treat common menopausal symptoms like hot flushes, night sweats and loss of libido, or to deal with the depression that afflicts so many.Ĭarol Vorderman at the Pride of Britain awards at Grosvenor House in 2013 I’ve never felt that awful depression since - nor would I ever want to.’ ‘When you’re given hope you feel instantaneously better anyway, and by the second day of applying the gels and cream I felt fine back to my old self. The change in her mood was sudden and miraculous. ‘I thought: “Perhaps it’s connected with the menopause.” Suddenly there was hope.’Ī friend recommended she see Professor John Studd, a London-based expert on menopausal depression, and in January last year, he prescribed bio-identical hormones - so called because they are derived from plants and more closely mimic the naturally occurring hormones in the human body than conventional HRT.Ĭarol was given oestrogen, testosterone and progesterone supplements in gel and cream form, so they are absorbed through the skin. She started plotting them against her cycle. This is caused when a woman’s oestrogen levels, usually around the age of 50, suddenly plummet, causing a variety of symptoms, some severe, some mild.Īlthough at 54 Carol says she was still having regular periods - and this is not uncommon among menopausal women - what was unusual were her sudden, extreme mood swings. ![]() At any point, 13 million women in Britain are menopausal. #Hrt 2 tv program live in ten trialVorderman during a Bushtucker Trial on I'm a Celebrity.Get Me Out of Here!Īnd there she found it, in the unlikely place of the menopause. The problem-solver in her started researching depression which made her analyse the issue and look for patterns. This descent into despair seemed inexplicable, until Carol began to make sense of it. ‘On the outside people wouldn’t know - I’m well-rehearsed at laughing in company - but as soon as I was back on my own, I’d be on the floor again.’ I barely slept unless I took a sleeping pill, and then I’d wake in a fog that added to the other fog in my mind. ‘You’d feel as if the rest of the world was carrying on its everyday business and you were this weirdo, sitting on the sidelines. You’d think: “Is there something wrong with me?” ‘There would be short respites when you had to do something for a few hours, or you’d see some friends, but as soon as you stopped you’d be back in the pit of despair. Carol pictured a the age of 50 with her two children Cameron, then 20, and Katie, then 25, from her second marriage to management consultant Patrick King, which ended in 2000 ![]()
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