Why Psychology Must Make Space for Women’s Cyclicity

I do not know for certain whether women’s cyclicity, or awareness of the menstrual cycle, was ever included in defining what is normal for humankind as a whole, especially in terms of psychology and social needs. In Western culture, I do not think it was.

When I think about mental health and women’s cyclicity, I imagine a woman looking for help.

She reaches out to the doctor’s office during the proactive follicular phase, when she feels her bravest. She has to wait two or three weeks for an appointment, and by then, she may be in her premenstrual or menstrual phase.

In one case, she is exhausted. In the other, she is quiet and withdrawn.

After the long-awaited appointment, she books another one. The receptionist tells her that the doctor will see her in a month.

However, in four weeks, she may find herself in a similar emotional and physical phase again, with its own set of perceptions, reactions, and attitudes.

And again, she has to come back.

What do you think will not happen?

The doctor will not necessarily get to see her other versions of herself — her other reactions and her other responses to the same life situation that brought her to their chair.

If cyclical patterns are relevant to what she is experiencing, the clinical picture may therefore be incomplete.

And that makes me wonder whether women may sometimes receive the wrong timing of help rather than the wrong kind of help in therapy, counseling, and mental health care.

Is there a difference in how female and male patients are treated in psychology and mental health care? I ask.

Did we create space for women’s cyclicity in mental health without pathologizing it and without ignoring cycle-based emotional changes? I ask.

Is there a place for women’s cyclicity in the systems that define psychological “normal”? I ask.

Who shaped what “normal” means in psychology, philosophy, and models of human behavior?

I do a quick search of the first names of prominent authors in psychology from modern curricula, and the names I find are David and Nathan, James and John, Elliot and Ronald, Robert, Daniel, and Steven — names that keep shaping modern psychology textbooks and academic frameworks.

Then I take a broader philosophical view of life, purpose, and the world’s order.

Who were the thinkers whose views shaped not only our past, but also the directions we still follow in philosophy and theories of human cognition?

A quick search gives me Plato and Aristotle, Immanuel and John, John and Thomas, Jean-Jacques and Robert, Peter and Ludwig, Bertrand and Karl, Simon, Thomas, and Nagel — the foundations of Western philosophy, ethics, and epistemology.

Where are women’s views, life perceptions, and experiences?

How different would philosophy be if women were given the space and time to share their cyclical understanding of life?

I have to dig deeper and specifically search for women authors in psychology, feminist philosophy, and gender studies.

And I find Laura and Judith, Simone and Hannah, Martha and Susanne, Carol and Shelley, Angela and Elizabeth, Bell and Susan, Ann and Mary, Barbara and Alice.

All recent, like women did not think before.

I consider searching in religion too, but I already know what I will find.

Until now, women’s cyclicity has not always had an intentional, neutral place in mainstream conversations about psychology, psychiatry, and mental health.

There is still a meaningful gap in how we talk about cyclical emotional and physical changes without either pathologizing them or dismissing them.

We have diagnostic language for many forms of psychological distress, but much less everyday language for understanding the relationship between cyclical changes, individual experience, emotional health, and the broader context of a woman’s life.

And perhaps this is part of what needs to change.

Perhaps psychology does not need to create a separate psychology for women.

Perhaps it needs to make its picture of humankind bigger.

And humankind, like a glass, is only half full until we add women’s cyclicity to it.

Written on early luteal phase (calm, cozy, reflective)

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