Is it normal or PMS? : women’s strategies in negotiating and resisting negative premenstrual change

Since the time of Aristotle and Plato Western medical explanations for women’s reproductive distress have centred on the body, with medicine laying the blame for many forms of distress on wandering wombs and, more recently, on raging hormones and neurotransmitter imbalances (Ussher, 1989). Contemporary Western medicine categorizes negative premenstrual change as premenstrual syndrome (PMS) or premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a fixed and unitary pathology within the woman deemed to be caused by biomedical or psychological factors (Ussher, 2011) and estimated to be of the same magnitude as major depressive disorder in reducing women’s quality of life and economic functioning (Halbreich, Borenstein, Pearlstein, & Kahn, 2003). However, disparities between and within cultures in the reporting of premenstrual distress – and in the positioning of premenstrual change as pathology – raise questions about the validity of individualizing biomedical and psychological theories of premenstrual change (Cosgrove & Caplan, 2004).