“Some Days I Couldn’t Get Out Of Bed”
Shelly Horton has one hell of smile. It has become a trademark of the journalist and TV presenter’s regular appearances on the Nine Network and 9Honey. But that smile disappeared recently when Shelly was struck by perimenopausal depression.
“It absolutely sideswiped me,” Shelly says. “I’d never even heard of perimenopause. I knew about menopause, but I thought it was something you didn’t have to deal with until your 50s, not something that could affect you at 46.”
Like many women, Shelly didn’t recognise the early symptoms of perimenopause. “I noticed I was suffering from anxiety, but I wrote it off as COVID anxiety. I was also getting hot flushes but as I’m overweight, I just blamed it on that.”
Her perimenopause was diagnosed almost by accident. Shelly had been using an IUD for more than a decade to stop her heavy periods. When she got her first period in 13 years, she was worried that the IUD might have dislodged. Her GP confirmed it was still in place, and ran a series of tests including hormone checks that revealed Shelly was in perimenopause.
“She put me on hormone replacement therapy, but it did nothing for me. And then I developed depression. I have had short bouts of depression before but they were always triggered by an event – a divorce, the loss of my job – and I’d never needed medication before. Now I was crying every day, and I’m not a crier. I’d just feel totally overwhelmed and cry these big fat tears.”
Shelly turned to one of her best friends, GP Ginni Mansberg, for help. “Because she’s my friend I’d never wanted her to be my GP, but she’s written a book about menopause called The M Word, so I asked her to take me on as a patient.” Dr Mansberg prescribed a different type of hormone replacement therapy and a mild antidepressant, but the tears didn’t stop – nor did the lack of motivation.
“I’m a very, very motivated person. I run my own business as well as the work I do for the Nine Network, but for the first time in my life I had no desire to work,” Shelly says. “Some days I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t want to watch TV, I didn’t want to read. I didn’t have the energy to do anything. I cancelled plans, I flaked out on people. It was really scary. I didn’t ever have suicidal thoughts but I can imagine if I’d let it continue, it might have gone down that path.”
““When I was sitting there crying for no reason, my husband would hold my hand and say, ‘It’s not you, it’s the chemicals in your brain. We’ll sort it out.’””
Shelly says the unwavering support of her partner helped her keep going. “When I was sitting there crying for no reason, my husband would hold my hand and say, ‘It’s not you, it’s the chemicals in your brain. We’ll sort it out.’”
Dr Mansberg explained that one in three women get depression and anxiety when they go through perimenopause and recommended stronger antidepressants.
“I felt so ridiculously ashamed at first. I felt like a failure,” Shelly remembers. But the treatment proved to be a gamechanger.
“The antidepressant is supposed to take four weeks to start working properly in your system but by day three, the real me was back. It’s been life-changing. I haven’t cried a single tear since. I can hardly recognise the person who went through that. I look back on those six months and think, who was that person?”
Shelly says she is lucky that that the antidepressant worked so quickly, and that she found the right formulation on her second try. “I’ve had friends who have tried three or four antidepressants before they find the right one. You need to keep talking to your GP until you find the right one,” she says.
When Shelly posted about her experience on Instagram, she was blown away by the response. “Usually I might get around 300 likes on a post. This time I got 3000 likes. It made me realise I needed to speak out about this, to help people be aware of this. So that’s my new mission, to talk about perimenopause to women, and to men, and try to change attitudes.”
Shelly is tired of the stigma around menopause. “We are taught that we should hide menopausal symptoms, be embarrassed by them, because it means you are ageing and there is a stigma around ageing. I’m 47 and I don’t feel old at all – if anything, age is wisdom.”