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This week, The Guardian reported on a survey by the Royal College of Psychiatrists claiming that ‘three in four women do not know that menopause causes mental illness.’ Read that sentence again. Menopause causes mental illness, apparently. And the silly women don’t even know about it. Give us all a goddamn break, please. It is hard to overstate how pathologising, misleading, and politically loaded that statement is. And it is even harder to ignore the fact that this message was not stumbled upon accidentally by a journalist. It was issued as a press-friendly finding by one of the most powerful psychiatric institutions in the UK. The Royal College of Psychiatrists. A disgusting and deliberate tactic to frame menopausal and perimenopausal women as mentally ill, and of course, unaware. As a psychologist who has spent years researching the psychiatric labelling of women and girls, and as the author of Sexy But Psycho, I find this framing deeply concerning. Because this is exactly how it happens. First, women’s normal physiological processes are reframed as psychiatric risk factors. Then women are told they are unaware, uninformed, or ignorant about their own bodies. Then the screening increases. Everyone celebrates more screening of women. Then the diagnoses increase. Then the prescribing increases. And before long, an entire life stage has been recoded as a mental health disorder waiting to happen. This is not a drill, ladies. This is not a drill.