Peri/Menopause, Mood & the Mind
When It's Hormones, When It Isn't, and What Therapists Can Do
For the therapist whose 45-year-old client has a first depressive episode, no psychiatric history, and a medical chart that says "stress."
Case-based | Self-paced + 1 live session | For Mental Health Therapists ( LCSWs, LPCs, LMFTs, LMSW, APC, AMFT, LPC-A)
Complete the course and get listed on the Remedy Meducation® clinician directory, the referral network of clinicians who have trained with us.
SIGN UP FOR THE WAITLISTCourse Philosophy
Your client is in their mid-forties. No history of depression. Now they can't sleep past 3 a.m., they lose words mid-sentence, and they are frightened by a rage they don't recognize as their own. Their cycles are still regular. Their doctor said it was stress.
So you work on the stress. You process the caregiving load, the career pressure, the marriage. It helps a little. The floor keeps dropping anyway.
The menopausal transition is one of the few points in adult life where a first-onset mood disorder is routinely explained away by circumstance. In perimenopause, the mental health symptoms often show up years before the hot flashes that would make anyone think to ask. And the final period is not a finish line: sleep, cognitive, and vasomotor symptoms can run well into menopause. Therapists are frequently the first clinician to see it. Most were never trained to recognize it.
This course teaches mental health therapists how perimenopause and menopause present in the therapy room, and what is often going on underneath. Hormonal variability matters, but so do sleep, blood sugar stability, iron and thyroid status, alcohol, and stress physiology. You won't be treating any of it. You will learn to recognize it, know what a thorough workup looks like, and know where to send the client next.
It is built on cases, taught by a prescriber and a therapist together, and honest about where the evidence is thin.
And when you finish, you join the Remedy Meducation® Clinician Directory.
It lists clinicians who have completed our courses, including prescribers trained in our flagship clinical course, Filling in the Gaps™: A Functional Framework for Peri/Menopause. Those prescribers need therapists who understand this transition. The directory is how they find you.
The Problem
Your training covered hormones in one postpartum lecture, if it covered them at all.
So when a client says "Is this me, or is this my hormones?" you don't have a good answer. You can't tell a vasomotor surge from a panic attack by description. You aren't sure whether new irritability is a hormonal pattern, a relationship pattern, or a hypomanic one. And when you do suspect something physiological, you don't know who to send the client to, what to put in the referral, or how to tell a prescriber who will look at the whole picture from one who will run a TSH, call it normal, and send them back to you.
Meanwhile the client has usually been dismissed at least once already. "You're too young for menopause." "Your labs are normal." "Have you tried yoga." By the time they reach you, the medical dismissal is part of what you're treating.
None of this requires you to become a hormone expert. It requires you to know what you're looking at, what else it could be, and who to send the client to next.
This course fixes that.
This Course Is Not For You If...
You want to learn to recommend hormone doses or specific medications. This course is explicit about what is and isn't in a therapist's scope.
You're looking for a supplement protocol to hand clients. You'll learn what physiology to suspect and who to send it to, not what to recommend.
You believe every midlife mood change is hormonal. There's an entire module on what else it could be, including the diagnosis you really don't want to miss.
This Course Is For You If...
You've had a client in their 40s with first-onset depression or panic and nothing in their history to explain it
Clients bring you rage and irritability that frighten them, and nobody has named what it might be
You've been asked "is this me or my hormones?" and didn't have a clinically grounded answer
Your clients arrive after being dismissed by medical providers, and the dismissal has become its own wound
You suspect something physiological is going on and want to know what a thorough workup looks like, so you can tell a real evaluation from a dismissive one
You want a referral path to prescribers who look at the whole picture, and a referral letter they will actually read and act on
You want CBT-I, DBT, ACT, EMDR, and somatic approaches applied specifically to this transition
You want to be the therapist that menopause-informed prescribers refer their clients to
If clients in perimenopause or menopause are already on your caseload, and statistically they are, this course changes what you notice and what you do about it.
What You'll Learn
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
Describe the stages of the menopausal transition, from early perimenopause through postmenopause, and explain why hormonal variability, not simple decline, drives much of the perimenopausal symptom burden
Recognize the mood, anxiety, cognitive, and sleep presentations of perimenopause and menopause, and distinguish them from primary psychiatric illness
Identify the conditions that mimic or coexist with menopausal mood change, including thyroid disease, sleep apnea, alcohol use, and bipolar II
Describe the physiology that shapes mood in the transition, including sleep, blood sugar stability, nutrient and thyroid status, and stress physiology, and what a thorough, functionally informed workup includes
Summarize the evidence for hormonal and non-hormonal treatment of menopausal mood symptoms at the level a therapist needs, without crossing into prescribing
Apply evidence-supported psychotherapeutic approaches to the sleep, rage, identity, and panic presentations common in this population
Make referrals that work: know when to refer, what to include, which red flags require escalation, how to find a prescriber trained to evaluate the whole picture, and how to build that relationship before you need it
Course Curriculum
MODULE 1: What Is Perimenopause, and What Comes After?
MODULE 2: How the Transition Shows Up as Mental Illness
MODULE 3: What Else Could It Be?
MODULE 4: Treatments Available
MODULE 5: What Therapy Offers
MODULE 6: Case Studies
MODULE 7: Working Together
COURSE RESOURCES
What Makes This Course Different
Join our Meducation Directory
Complete the course and you are listed on the Remedy Meducation® clinician directory, open only to clinicians who have completed our courses. That includes prescribers trained in our flagship peri/menopause course, who need therapists who understand this transition. You need prescribers who will evaluate the whole picture. The directory connects the two.
Written for the Therapy Room
Most menopause education is written for prescribers, and most mental health CE treats hormones as someone else's problem. This course is built for the clinician who sees the client weekly and is often the first to notice something is off.
The Physiology Under the Mood
Most menopause training for therapists stops at "it might be hormones." This course goes further: sleep, blood sugar, nutrient status, thyroid, alcohol, and stress physiology, taught so you can recognize them, not treat them. And not everything is hormonal, including bipolar II, where treating it as unipolar depression carries real risk.
Scope-Clear
You'll know what you can say about hormones, what you should say, and what belongs to the prescriber. This course makes you a better collaborator, not a stand-in prescriber.
Two Disciplines, One Course
Taught by a menopause-certified nurse practitioner and a licensed therapist, with a live session to bring your own cases and questions, because the client needs both and the two fields rarely talk to each other.
Evidence-Honest
Where the data on treatment and mood is solid, we say so. Where it's thin, including much of what clients find online, we say that too.
Lillian Medhus, DNP, WHNP-BC, CNM, MSCP
is a doctorally prepared women's health nurse practitioner and certified nurse-midwife, faculty in a university-based WHNP program, and founder of Aspire Women's Wellness, a specialty practice focused on the integrative management of endometriosis.
Stacy Marie, FNP-BC, AGACNP-BC, IFMCP, MSCP
is a double board-certified nurse practitioner with over 18 years of clinical experience and the creator of the FiGs Framework, the clinical reasoning scaffold behind the Filling in the Gaps™ course series.
