Читать книгу Counseling the Contemporary Woman - Suzanne Degges-White - Страница 103

Perhaps the most iconic event associated with women at midlife is the experience of menopause. Menopause is considered to have taken place after the passage of twelve months since a woman’s most recent menstrual period. Sadly, many women perceive their arrival into menopause as a marker of reaching “middle age” and a portent of a barren future. Menopause can be experienced as a natural transition or be a medically induced outcome due to removal of a woman’s ovaries. The average age for experiencing this transition naturally is approximately fifty-one, no matter where a woman resides around the globe (Rahman, Akesson, & Wolk, 2015). While the prediction of a woman’s age at menopause might inspire research, the most reliable predictor for most women is the age at which their own mothers reached menopause (Depmann et al., 2016). Some women are eager for menopause to arrive and celebrate it as a badge of honor of their arrival at a new stage of life; other women dread it as a sign of defeat.

It was only in the last two decades that any significant information was disseminated regarding the hormonal changes taking place prior to the arrival of menopause. Perimenopause describes the years that precede the final cessation of a woman’s menstrual cycles. It is during this period that a majority of the symptoms that are typically ascribed to menopause actually begin to appear, including hot flashes, sleep difficulties, and other physiological changes (Delamater & Santoro, 2018).