Is it PMS or PMDD?

Diana L. Dell and Carol Svec expose a diagnostic confusion that harms in both directions: a severe condition dismissed as "everyone has that," an ordinary fluctuation burdened with a clinical label. The boundary between premenstrual syndrome and premenstrual dysphoric disorder isn't drawn by symptom count but by timing, specifically whether symptoms clear after bleeding begins. When diagnosis shifts from retrospective questionnaires to daily logs across two cycles, prevalence estimates plummet from eight percent to one and a half. Memory, it turns out, files bad weeks under "the cycle" only when the calendar cooperates.

You'll learn:

- Why asking and tracking yield wildly different prevalence numbers

- How premenstrual exacerbation mimics but isn't the clinical condition

- What the two-cycle log requirement actually separates