{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Physician, Heal Thyself The Podcast","title":"Postpartum Hormones, Psychosis & What Doctors Are Missing in Women's Mental Health - EP119","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2484,"description":"She was a labor and delivery nurse. She told her husband, her mother, her family, and every medical professional she saw that something was terribly wrong. She was prescribed 13 psychiatric medications in four months. Her symptoms never resolved. She was not crazy — she was hormonally depleted and medically failed. And she is not the only one.\nPrompted by the high-profile Lindsey Clancy case, Dr. Ana Lara sets aside the legal narrative and speaks as a physician about what she sees as the central medical failure in this story and in countless women's stories that never make headlines: no one checked her hormones. She explains the dramatic hormonal cliff women fall off after delivery — progesterone dropping from 214 nanograms per milliliter during the third trimester to effectively zero after the placenta is delivered, estradiol crashing from peaks of 30,000 picograms per milliliter to nothing — and what that physiological free fall produces: insomnia, racing thoughts, anxiety, paranoia, emotional dissociation, brain fog, and a feeling of losing one's mind that is not a psychiatric disorder but a hormonal emergency. She walks through the clinical data: progesterone levels optimal range of 15–24 nanograms per milliliter in a menstruating woman, the pattern she sees regularly of young women — even teenagers — testing at under 1. She explains the role of progesterone in sleep, nervous system regulation, brain protection, and mood, and the role of estradiol in memory, emotional regulation, serotonin function, and sleep architecture. She names the specific hormones every woman should have tested — progesterone, estradiol, pregnenolone, DHEA-S, testosterone, cortisol, vitamin D, B12 — and why postpartum screening for hormone depletion should be standard care. She closes with a direct message to women: you are not crazy. Your hormones need to be checked. Don't wait for a crisis. And she mentions vitex (chaste tree berry) as an herb that supports the body's own hormone...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/7BlbO0DlxZ9TfxfXnOie8HzzksLgXXsUBE22ReU_fyU/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9jYzA3/ZmYwMzJjZTkyMGUx/YzIyYWQxMTE5MGQ4/Mjc3Yy5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}