In modern society, however, there are different standards of success, and high testosterone men don t have the same advantages. Often, the highest testosterone men are now unemployed. She sings PMS Blues in a special performance for The Infinite Mind. Dr. Goodwin is joined by two senior investigators from the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Peter Schmidt and Dr. Catherine Roca . Dr. Roca says that recent research into premenstrual syndrome shows that PMS is not caused by abnormal hormone levels, but rather by an abnormal response to normal hormone levels.
Many women have some symptoms like tension or bloating prior to some menstrual cycles.
But women suffering from severe PMS have symptoms that are consistently present every month and cause some dysfunction or disruption in work, life, or relationships. Often, severe PMS goes beyond physical symptoms and causes a change in experiential state - that is, a woman might feel a change in her perceptions, perhaps no longer finding joy in things that are ordinarily pleasant. Serafem is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, that is, it increases the amount of seratonin available in the brain. Sixty to seventy percent of women treated with it seem to experience relief of symptoms, but no one is sure exactly how it works. Schmidt and Roca are also doing research into other possible new treatments.