For decades, women’s midlife experiences have been largely overlooked by medical research. Despite previous assumptions about midlife mental health risks, relatively little research has systematically investigated the connections between hormonal fluctuations and psychological symptoms.

Now, researchers from Michigan State University’s Department of Psychology are examining the understudied period of perimenopause and its potential impacts on mental health thanks to a $3.7 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

MSU Research Foundation Professor Kelly Klump, Associate Professor Katharine Thakkar and Research Specialist Kristen Culbert are conducting the study — the first to comprehensively examine how hormonal changes during midlife might influence psychosis as well as other mental health outcomes like bipolar disorder.

“There’s been a noticeable absence of research in this area,” said Culbert, the study’s co-principal investigator. “We have known there is a midlife spike in psychosis in women that is not observed in men, but we haven’t known why. Our study is the first to examine perimenopausal shifts in hormones in an intensive daily study to see if hormones, not age, predict increased risk for psychosis in women.”