Students’ representations of menopause and perimenopause: Out of control bodies and empathetic expert doctors

Representations of peri/menopause are influential in relation to how peri/menopause is understood and how peri/menopausal women are perceived, both of which have important implications for health and wellbeing. In this paper, we report results from a story completion study with 102 undergraduate psychology students. Participants were invited to write a response to a fictional scenario about a peri/menopausal woman. Thematic analysis was used to construct two themes. In the first theme, Women’s bodies out of control, we report how students represented peri/menopausal women’s bodies as unpredictable and uncontrollable. In the second theme, Doctors as empathetic experts: A (biomedical) problem in need of (medical) intervention, we demonstrate how participants wrote stories that portrayed peri/menopause as a medical problem to be easily and effectively resolved by a doctor. These doctors were consistently characterized as empathetic and as experts of peri/menopause. We consider the extent to which these fictional stories might (or might not) map onto women’s lived experiences of peri/menopause by drawing on extant literature. Our results contribute to understandings of how young people represent peri/menopause and peri/menopausal women. These results have implications for educators in ensuring that menopause is included in their curricula, and for health professionals in their practice.