spinofflive
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

SocietyNovember 9, 2022

Why does no one know about the premenstrual hell that is PMDD?

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

Its impact on mood is severe, but premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), an extreme form of premenstrual syndrome that affects one in 20 people with periods, is often misdiagnosed.

Irrational, mental or just plain bitchy. Most women have had these words thrown at them in some form or another, but for sufferers of PMDD, the main way they describe themselves during this luteal phase – between ovulation and menstruation – is crazy.

For me, the turning point came when, in a blind rage, I threw a mug across a room. As I looked at the smashed pieces, I only had one thought: “Something is wrong with me.

I started keeping a journal of my symptoms. One thing became obvious. Every six weeks or so, for no reason, I would lose my mind. The symptoms would last two to three days, and then I would get my period. I knew this couldn’t be normal PMS, so I started googling.

Most of us have heard of premenstrual syndrome (PMS), the time during a person’s menstrual cycle, when they can be moody, in pain, and tired. PMS is annoying and uncomfortable but rarely life-changing. But for the 3-8 % of people who suffer from premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) this time can not only affect their work and relationships but even have lethal outcomes.

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder is a severe form of PMS. Classed as a mood disorder, symptoms can include anxiety, paranoia and aggression. It can also manifest physically with heart palpitations, fainting and decreased coordination. However, the symptom most concerning for those afflicted is depression. An overwhelming, all-consuming sense of worthlessness. According to a recent study, people with PMDD are seven times more likely to attempt suicide than the average PMS sufferer.

‘Love The Spinoff? Its future depends on your support. Become a member today.’
Madeleine Chapman
— Editor

So why does this disorder, which can affect as many as one in 20 women, have such a low profile? In all the health classes we were subjected to at school, where we would be separated by gender, led to a room where us girls would giggle behind our hands as we learned about our future “curse,” PMDD was never mentioned as a possibility. Maybe it was because of our age. Some suggest that the average onset of symptoms is around 26. It could be an issue with being diagnosed in the first place. There is no blood-test for PMDD. The only way for someone to be diagnosed is through symptom collection. If you can present convincingly enough to your doctor, a diagnosis might be made. But it is hard to know to visit a doctor when you think you simply have really, really bad PMS.

When I took my symptom journal to my doctor, I’d suffered from an anxiety disorder for many years and my symptoms were dismissed as a symptom of that. So I went to another doctor and was told that it was normal PMS. Rinse and repeat. No matter how many times I tried to explain that what I was feeling wasn’t the same as my usual anxiety, it was dismissed.  I knew what my anxiety did to me. What was going on with me, every couple of weeks, was not anxiety. Unfortunately, this is a widespread problem, as studies have shown that women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men, and that female medical issues are less researched.

“Trust me you’re just really, really anxious… before your period.” (Photo: Getty Images)

When I finally managed to get diagnosed, two years and multiple doctors later, it felt like a weight had been lifted. In the end it wasn’t a medical doctor who brought PMDD to my attention but a therapist. When I explained what was going on she recognised exactly what it was. I was ecstatic. I wasn’t going insane. Something was wrong. It even had a name. However, that was just the beginning of a new fight.

Treatments for PMDD are still developing. The most common remedies right now are combinations of anti-depressants, talk therapy and birth control. While these can lessen symptoms, they are not a cure.

Since being diagnosed I have been told to both lose and gain weight, get off a certain birth control and on a different one and I’ve been prescribed multiple different mood adjustment medications. Treatment has also been hindered by the fact that I don’t have a regular 28-day cycle. While 28 days is only the average cycle length for women, some healthcare professionals see it as a fixed universal rule.

I’m still trying to figure out what works best for my body. It’s trial and error. On the plus side, I now know what is happening to me. When I start to feel my emotions becoming out of control, I know better how to deal with it. It’s tiring and scary. I only wish I had known of PMDD earlier. I could have saved me and my family some heartache.

Keep going!
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

SocietyNovember 9, 2022

A brief history of sabotage in New Zealand

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

It first appeared in New Zealand law in the Crimes Act 1961, but the history of sabotage in this country dates back much further.

Sabotage is in the news. The trial of Graham Philip – said to be the first person ever convicted of sabotage in New Zealand – is shrouded in legal fog. Having pleaded guilty to seven charges of sabotage and one charge of entering agricultural land with intent to commit an imprisonable offence, Philip faces lengthy jail time. Exactly what he did in November 2021 is unclear. Citing fears of copycat offending, the details cannot be reported. Instead, news agencies have focused on the historic milestone the case represents.

According to the Ministry of Justice, “a search of the Case Management System for records for the period of January 1, 1980 and December 31, 2021 for charges or convictions of sabotage produced no results.” In New Zealand law, the crime of sabotage first appears in the Crimes Act 1961, one of many crimes deemed treasonous to the Queen and state.

Yet sabotage has a much older history in New Zealand. Its local story encompasses machine breaking by disgruntled farm labourers, rural arson (aka “incendiarism”), industrial sabotage and responses to the First World War.

In the mid 19th century, many of the working-class Pākehā arrivals from the UK had lived experience of popular protest. Revolts by impoverished agricultural labourers such as the Swing Riots of 1830–31 would have been still fresh in their minds. The targets of such uprisings were often threshing machines, which were destroyed in droves. Wrecking farm equipment and burning property was a collective, widespread movement aimed at improving the economic lot of those suffering a poor harvest and a swollen labour market, with very little means to survive besides poor relief. For these new arrivals, memories of sabotage were stored away like luggage and brought with them to Aotearoa.

‘GREAT FIRE AT DUNEDIN’. Evening Post, 6 December 1880. (National Library of New Zealand)

The state recognised this too. But instead of the word “sabotage”, New Zealand law in the 1860s prohibited “malicious injuries to property”. Fire had always been a weapon of the poor. Setting fire to “any house stable coach-house outhouse warehouse office shop mill malt-house hop-oast barn storehouse granary hovel shed or fold or to any farm building or to any building or erection used in farming land or in carrying on any trade or manufacture” was strictly illegal. Property was protected against the protests of those who had none.

By the 1890s, cases of arson and rural incendiarism in New Zealand were rife. “A bad spate of fire-raising in 1892 and early 1893, when fields, stacks of wheat and farm buildings on estates were destroyed, was attributed to sinister and revolutionary incendiarists” writes Steven Eldred-Grigg. “Fire-raising occurred all through the period, with another severe bout beginning in 1896 with a large fire on Coldstream.”

The law now labelled such protest as “mischief”, which included setting fire to crops, obstructing railways, hindering the operation of a coal mine or providing gunpowder to commit a crime. By 1908, the Crimes Act had codified these acts of “mischief” to manage an increasingly militant working-class movement, some of whom openly advocated “scientific sabotage” as a weapon of class war.

Formed in 1905 in Chicago, the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, whose members were known as Wobblies), took up the idea of industrial sabotage popularised by radical movements in Europe. Coded references to “the wooden shoe” harked back to the sabots or wooden shoes worn by French peasants in early factories. In one telling, slipping a wooden sabot into a loom or machine was the original act of industrial sabotage. A more likely version is that getting around in wooden shoes was slow, clumsy and inefficient. Sabotage in this sense meant to work slowly.

An Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) graphic from 1915 showing a wooden shoe (sabot) crushing a top-hatted capitalist. The quotation is from IWW official W.D. Haywood (Image: Public Domain)

Indeed, sabotage in Wobbly terms was aimed at the wallets of the capitalist class, not their persons. “Sabotage absolutely does not imply personal violence,” explained the newspaper of the New Zealand IWW. “We emphasise that statement, for the arch-lie levelled against the IWW is that we have no respect for life and limb.” Sabotage “does not aim for the destruction of a thing, but at the profits of an industry through the hampering of production. Simply, it is a form of strike which precludes starvation.” Going slow, working to rule (the original “quiet quitting”) and the collective withdrawal of workplace efficiency was how workers could win better conditions and shorter hours.

The Great Strike of 1913 – which included acts of industrial sabotage – followed by the First World War, meant sabotage was daily news. Newspaper headlines screamed of Wobblies, anarchists and foreigners said to be sinking ships at will. Take the case of “Gretchen”, a German woman who supposedly confessed to wrapping a bomb in baby clothes to sink an ocean liner in the United States. The story of “The baby and the bomb” was fake news, although it delighted at least one poet:

She pays her mysterious visit,
Down to the swarming pier;
Baby or bomb, which is it,
The bundle she carries here?
’Ware how you stoop to pick up
The parcel that goes tick-tock;
It may be a baby’s hiccup.
Or a dreadful dynamite clock.

The weekly pictorial newspaper The Free Lance believed pro-German foreigners and “stealthy rascals” with “anarchical intentions” were stalking the wharves with pocket-sized bombs, ready to plant infernal machines into ships. The government was not immune to such hysteria. “Information has been received that the Germans are now sending infernal machines from Sweden to USA in the form of a preserved meat tin,” reported one official. When the Port Kembla hit a German mine off the coast of Farewell Spit in 1917, the captain, crew, reporters and politicians were certain the cause was sabotage.

The front page image of the New Zealand Observer, December 16, 1916. (National Library of New Zealand)

From 1914 onwards, War Regulations were passed to prevent the sabotage of military equipment and access to the wharves and other defence sites were curtailed. Xenophobia and fear of the “enemy within” was rife. Everyone was talking about sabotage.

Which brings us back to 2022. Modern laws preventing the sabotage of government infrastructure – such as the law Graham Philip is charged under – have their origin in First World War regulations and the longer history of industrial protest. However, the advocates of industrial sabotage such as the IWW had legitimate grievances. They were grounded in a larger workers’ movement, a movement that took on the ills of capitalism and aimed for meaningful, collective and material change. That’s an important difference.

‘Become a member and help us keep local, independent journalism thriving.’
Alice Neville
— Deputy editor
But wait there's more!