Menopause was for decades a word that dare not speak its name. Today it’s all over the airwaves. Davina McCall has fronted several documentaries about a period of transition that half of us will experience. It has fuelled a phone-in deluge on Liveline and, last summer, an RTÉ film. What next: Menopause the Musical? Actually, that’s already a thing.
Gráinne Seoige’s Meanapás: Meon Nua (TG4, Wednesday, 9.30pm) is different for several reasons. For one, it is deeply personal – a gear shift for a broadcaster whose public persona has always been one of stoicism and reserve.
It’s also unapologetically bleak in places. You have to credit Seoige for not condescending to her audience by trying to sell a Hallmark vision of menopause as an opportunity for renewal or self-knowledge. It can be both. But there is no glossing over its drawbacks.
“I’m known for being a very private woman ... This is not easy for me at all,” Seoige says in one of many scenes in which she walks along a beach or stares into the distance. “I want to help all my sisters. That’s more important than my own privacy.”
Seoige is best known as a news anchor. Yet she displays the hard-boiled curiosity of a shoe-leather reporter as she sets out on the road. In Cork she meets 30-year-old Jess Ní Mhaoláin, who endured heartache when she had a hysterectomy in her late 20s and has required oestrogen therapy ever since. “I never thought about having kids,” she says. “That day my heart broke, and it never got put back together again.”
The point the film stresses, again and again, is that menopause isn’t just an inconvenience or a quirk of growing older. It can be a real challenge to a woman’s physical and mental wellbeing. “Shame and menopause have been synonymous for decades,” says Breeda Bermingham, a menopause coach and author who explains that suicide rates for women peak at 51 (about the age at which menopause typically begins).
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Seoige also meets the comedian Deirdre O’Kane, who expresses her dismay at the enthusiasm with which many GPs prescribe antidepressants for women in middle age. And she has a sit-down with Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, who very vaguely commits his support to a campaign of public-information leaflets about menopause. “We could have that campaign ... pretty soon,” he says, sounding like a parody of an evasive politician from The Simpsons.
What this film isn’t, thank goodness, is a “journey of discovery” for Seoige. She is already well acquainted with the changes that occur during the perimenopausal and menopausal phases of a woman’s life. Everyone knows about going through puberty, she says. “I’d love for everyone to have the same kind of knowledge around menopause.”
Whether that wish is fulfilled remains to be seen. Either way, Seoige has contributed to the debate around menopause with a thoughtful and humane documentary that acknowledges the benefits of growing older but doesn’t shy away from the downsides.
