A Path for Polly: Shamanism vs. PMDD
How Polly's Search for PMDD Solutions Transformed into a Dance with the Divine
Before we get into the nitty gritty - TW: Suicidal Ideation, Medical System Trauma
Please see our HARM REDUCTION GUIDE for female biology as well.
Struggling with depression for most of her life, Polly started noticing a change in her mood during the pandemic. Twenty-three at the time, and still living in the family home after finishing University, Polly’s environment changed suddenly when her family started to work from home. Everyone was doing work calls in every part of the house - including the kitchen - and there was nowhere for Polly to escape from the chaos.
“You just want to be in a dark little cocoon like no one’s coming in, it’s just you. I would try to hide, but I have a lot of family and I would be in the middle of an intense episode and my little nieces would just come running into my room. It felt so overwhelming.”
What once felt like a consistently clouded mood, seemed to transform into a more cyclical pattern of deep depression, panic attacks, and suicidal ideation. Seeking immediate help for her mental health, she began the process of working with doctors to try to figure out what was happening. After numerous tests, a female hormone specialist told Polly she had low progesterone that was likely causing the depression and prescribed a progesterone cream to apply topically.
“It was completely sold to me as if this is the miracle cure, it’s nature’s anti-depressant and it’s going to help you. After I started using it, all of a sudden my depression just changed and it got absolutely horrific.”
Desperate for answers, Polly started doing her own research on cyclical depression and came across premenstrual dysphoric disorder, or PMDD. Never thinking to track her symptoms according to her menstrual cycle, Polly soon realized her symptoms were relieved when she started her period. PMDD is believed to be a sensitivity to normal fluctuations in ovarian hormones during the luteal phase of the cycle and for Polly, the hormonal treatments she was prescribed made her condition much worse.
“It was the most intense, I felt like I couldn’t live in my body anymore, needing to rip my skin off and banging my head against the wall just trying to knock myself out to not feel that kind of uncomfortableness and pain. Suicidal - being so desperate to end my life. Panic attacks as well, not being able to ever breathe properly, hours and hours of panic attacks. It was truly horrific. I always say one PMDD episode was worse than all the years of my depression combined.”
Immediately following up with the hormone specialist, she explained the cyclical nature of her symptoms and asked about PMDD. The hormone specialist had never heard of the condition before and offered little to no guidance on how to treat it. Although this may sound strange - a female hormone specialist not knowing about a severe condition related to female hormones - Polly’s story is unfortunately more common than one would think.
Women seeking help for PMDD in medical systems often have to work with numerous providers before they find one knowledgeable on the topic. Proper diagnosis takes an average of twelve years and a recent survey by the International Association of Premenstrual Disorders (IAPMD) found that up 34% of women with the condition have attempted suicide during a PMDD episode.
PMDD can present with a myriad of symptoms including a few that are not listed in the diagnostic criteria: extreme sensory sensitivity to lights, sounds, smells, other people’s vibes etc., dysmorphia and derealization.
“No one can understand, when you’re in the depths of PMDD and you look in the mirror and you actually see a different person. Like there’s some monster staring back at you and everyone is telling you “you don’t look any different”. If you already suffer from self-esteem issues, during this time it’s on steroids. And you look at yourself and feel like a monster, I felt like I couldn’t carry on. Because if I look like this, I’ll never be able to be loved and I’ll never be able to live a happy life.”
Going back to her regular doctor, Polly was referred to a specialist in London for help with PMDD. She was prescribed estrogen patches at first, but again, the symptoms worsened. Next, the Doctor prescribed Yaz birth control pills - a commonly prescribed treatment option for PMDD- and that’s when Polly’s symptoms were the worse they’ve ever been.
“I started noticing a pattern of the more I go to Western medicine, the sicker I’m getting, so it reached a breaking point where I felt like I didn’t have any options. What are my options if there are any left? That’s when I started to look into psychedelics. At first I thought I could try a clinical trial, because I didn’t know much about it, but the idea that I could get a sugar pill and going through all this stuff for a sugar pill and I was like, no. If I’m going to do this I need to know I’m doing it and fully prepare for it.”
Polly started searching for nearby psilocybin mushroom retreat centers, but because she was only twenty-four at the time, she wasn’t able to book a mushroom retreat. There is discussion in the scientific community about psychedelic use prior to age twenty-five because of concerns about the brain not being fully developed. This conversation is riddled with nuance, because risk is relative, and chronic suicidal ideation was arguably Polly’s biggest risk factor, but I digress.
Determined to get treatment, she was able to locate an Ayahuasca retreat in nearby Spain. Ayahuasca, a traditional Amazonian plant medicine, is brewed into a tea and has been used in South American cultures for ceremonial use and healing for hundreds of years.
For more detailed information about Ayahuasca, including case studies, harm reduction, and a theory on the biological mechanisms that may be involved in ayahuasca’s healing potential, I recommend The Fellowship of the River, by Dr. Joe Tafur. Dr. Tafur is a Western Medical Doctor who traveled to the Amazon, trained with Indigenous Shipibo Shamans and documented his healing work with Ayahuasca.
THE PURGE
At twenty four, Polly checked herself into the retreat center and embarked on a journey with Ayahuasca, an intense psychedelic substance that has been known to bring many grown men - including war veterans - to their knees, psychologically. While psychedelics can be full of love and euphoria, they can also bring up things that aren’t so easy to address, like past traumas and emotional wounds.
“It either takes courage or getting to such a low point in your life that you’re like, I don’t care. If I die, I die - I don’t even care at this point.”
Working with the Shaman at the retreat center, Polly was served the brew everyday in a group ceremony, consecutively, for five days and vomited each time after ingesting it. In shamanic practices, vomiting is believed to be a part of the purging process.
“It’s hard to explain. Every time when I went into ceremony and it starts to kick in, I thought to myself: why am I doing this, why am I here, I want to go home, Oh God, what have I done. But then after I came out of that and settled into the experience I was like ok, I can do this again. There were so many profound insights, but because it was my first experience, I couldn’t quite comprehend them all so it was more like, let’s completely purge everything that needs to be purged. It was as if Mother Ayahuasca took over my body, cleansed me, and at the end, she handed me the keys to my brand new body - something similar to someone washing your car for you. At one point, I do remember what one of the doctors said to me when I was seeking help for my depression: “You know this is a life sentence, you’ve got this for life, you’ll have to learn to manage it”. In my first ayahuasca ceremony I realized that was a lie and how dare he tell that to a depressed person, because what’s going to make them want to live?”
Side note - these types of comments coming from a medical professional is a major part of the problem with mental healthcare. Projecting limiting belief systems onto people seeking help isn’t healing, it’s harmful. If the doctor doesn’t believe you can get better that’s a solid red flag to fire them and find one who does - and quickly.
After five intense days of ceremony, when Polly returned home, she described the “afterglow” effect where everything is love and light, without the clouds of depression weighing on her like a wet blanket. She immediately began to change her environment and started her own purge of the social media accounts she was following.
Armed with a better understanding of her depression, she realized she had to make a change in her environment and started following more positive, uplifting content. This one hit close to home, because after my first few psychedelic experiences, I left many of the forums and unfollowed accounts that seemed to reinforce PMDD symptoms. Mental health disorders left unchecked can become a negative identity and Ayahuasca helped Polly realize PMDD didn’t have to consume her life.
She didn’t experience any PMDD symptoms for the following cycle after ayahuasca, but slowly, over the next few months some of the symptoms started to reemerge, but with less intensity.
“I started at a 10/10 with PMDD and after Ayahuasca, I was at a 5/10 once everything settled out, but the suicidal ideation was completely gone, and hasn’t come back. I’m grateful for that.”
A PMDD LOVE STORY
Following more positive content turned out to be more than Polly expected when - in a beautiful turn of events - she started dating someone she met in her new online community. After several subsequent psychedelic experiences with psilocybin mushrooms and San Pedro with the guidance and support of her new partner, Polly now reports a consistent 3-4 out of 10 for symptom severity.
“If I wake up and I’m having a bad day, I take a microdose of psilocybin. But I don’t need to take it all the time, it’s just when I need it now. No one really realizes how profound this is for me.”
In Polly’s case, the sensitivity isn’t completely gone, but with work she is able to manage it in such a way that it no longer consumes her life. Now, she’s working on building a future for herself and is exploring self-employment and freelancing opportunities so she can set her own hours and work according to the natural rhythms of her cycle.
“If anything, psychedelics really teach you how to be a master of your own body and mind. I would tell anyone on this journey with PMDD, if they’re considering psychedelics to walk towards the fear, because if they have PMDD there’s no psychedelic experience that could ever be worse than that.”
Polly’s story is one of many, and while psychedelics can truly change lives, they are a complex topic. For more information including harm reduction, and trip reports, my audiobook Channel Twelve: Premenstrual Dysphoria, Psychedelics and Altered States is available for free on YouTube.
Have a story you’d like to share? Send an email to info@dysphoricproject.org, we’d love to hear from you! We’re falling in love with meeting like-minded people through our work and grateful to be able to write about these powerful stories and share them with the community.