Listening To Estrogen

Hormones have always been a third rail in women’s mental health. They may also be a skeleton key.

- Lisa Miller

When she was 45, at around the same time her menstrual periods became irregular, Janet developed an obsession with a man at work. Now 61, Janet has the same job she had back then, managing the chemistry-department stockroom at a small northeastern college. But at the time, she was studying for a master’s degree and living in a suburb with her husband and teenage daughter, and Jim was a new addition to the chemistry faculty. He had a quiet, sensitive nervousness that appealed to Janet, and she felt from the outset that they had a bond.

The first time Janet began to feel seriously off was in the spring of 2001, when she was taking Jim’s inorganic chemistry class. Sitting in the lecture hall, listening to Jim talk about metals and compounds, Janet would feel a pain in her head, on the left side, slightly above and behind her ear—she indicates the area as if she were brushing away a fly—“like something was trying to get out of my head. And I knew it wasn’t right. Like a tumor. The weird thing was I would rub it and go, ‘Oh, I wish that would go away,’ and it would go away for about two minutes and then it would come back again. I’d say, ‘Well, a tumor wouldn’t go away if you rubbed it. So it’s not a tumor.’ ”

Janet first heard the voice—male, about 30 years old—while she was out with Jim and a group of co- workers at a TGI Fridays near campus. She was gazing at Jim (whose name, like some others’ in this story, has been changed) in the bar and thinking about how nice it would be to put her head on his shoulder. The voice said, “Go ahead!” It wanted her to snuggle up to him. She didn’t. She knew that would be ridiculous.