Oprah Winfrey is ready to normalize menopause.
The host and author recently gathered with her close friend and journalist Maria Shriver to speak about women’s health for the Paramount+ series “The Checkup with Dr. David Agus.”
Speaking to Agus and Shriver, Winfrey reiterated the evasive conversations she’d have with her mother when she’d ask her about what to expect for her future.
“I couldn’t get my mother to talk about it. I was just trying to find out what are the possibilities of me having hot flashes or something,” Winfrey explained, adding that when pressed, her mother said she didn’t even remember her body going through the change.
Menopause is a natural process that marks the end of a woman’s menstrual cycle and includes symptoms that can be mild or severe.
“My mother was a very, you know, shutdown person,” she remarked. “I think she did not have symptoms that she recognized. I think if you don’t have hot flashes, which I didn’t have hot flashes, then you don’t understand the mood swings.”
Winfrey explained that her desire to learn more and destigmatize the experience of menopause began when she realized that a lack of knowledge had put her through near hell.
“I have journals filled with ‘I don’t know if I’ll make it until the morning,’” she shared. “I thought I was going to die every night.”
Around the time that she experienced menopause, Winfrey explained that she began to feel listless and unable to focus long enough to read, a symptom that Winfrey says caused her to end Oprah’s Book Club. She also started to have extreme heart palpitations.
“I was perimenopausal, like in my late 40s, and having heart palpitations,” she recalled. “Going to every doctor possible trying to figure out what is it, what is it, what is it.”
According to Winfrey, she went to five different doctors seeking treatment for the palpitations— one practitioner who was a female heart doctor put her on heart medication and gave her an angiogram, a scan that shows the blood of arteries and veins.
“Nobody ever once suggested that it could be menopause,” she noted.
Shriver agreed, adding that they're "adamant" about speaking publicly about menopause because many women don't recognize all the symptoms.
“I think women think that, 'Oh menopause means the end of my period,' but they don't connect the dots of heart palpitations, anxiety, depression, listlessness, lack of concentration,” she explained. “They don't understand that it's actually happening first in the brain and that all of these emotions that they may be going through are physical changes they may be going through can be associated or attributed to perimenopause or menopause.”
During their discussion, Winfrey and Shriver concluded that, unintentionally or not, society has failed to adequately explain the potential that aging in women holds. Instead of instilling knowledge, it infuses apprehension.
“The whole culture is set up to tell you that the thing that is most natural. We’re surrounded by these beautiful trees here,” she explained, gesturing towards their interview setting. “That literally get better with age. I think we all get better with age — the culture is set up to tell us, in our particular society, that it’s the wrong thing.”
“I think just having women re-marketing menopause as not something to fear, not something that makes you crazy. There’s that whole thing out there in the zeitgeist (that) women who are in menopause are crazy, and then women are crazy in general,” Shriver noted. “The stigma will go away if women feel empowered and feel like there’s not something wrong with them if they talk about these issues they’re going through.”
“Especially for Black women,” Winfrey chimed in. “We have been known for bearing a lot and being the strong ones and keep moving no matter what.”
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