PCOS handbook and the Importance of dismantling shame around women’s health issues – Part 2

Interview between Siobha Murphy: Interviewer & Celia McCarthy: Medical Artist and Scientific Illustrator

Previously in Part 1: Celia shared her journey into medical art and the challenges of finding freelance opportunities in Ireland.

 

SIOBHA: You can see the importance of your work in how it allows people to visualise concepts that they wouldn’t normally be able to. Because again, unfortunately, and it’s something that needs to change, a lot of medicinal knowledge is very restricted behind either finance or education barriers. I know that your most recent project was the PCOS handbook. As someone with PCOS, it’s something I deeply appreciated reading because it was a visualisation of things that I experience every day, which, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t like to discuss or see or validate in others when they’re experiencing them. What was putting together that book like?

 

CELIA: Thanks for sharing! We did speak previously about the fact that we both have PCOS. So, I saw it as a kind of opportunity to explore, I suppose, a lot of the shame that I feel around my own PCOS. I discovered that I had PCOS when I was 16 years old, and at 16 years old, you don’t want to hear that you’re going to have acne and you’re going to have potentially excess hair all over your body. You don’t want to hear that it will be very easy to put on weight and you might not be able to have children. You shouldn’t even be thinking about having children when you’re 16.  But I was. I was like, I’m being robbed of my femininity and my opportunities to have a normal female life or whatever. I just know that I felt a lot of shame, and I also felt that I couldn’t find a lot of information on it. I think subconsciously, I thought that maybe it was such a shameful condition that people didn’t even want to talk about it online. Or, like, I couldn’t find any women posting about their hirsutism or their acne, for example. There would be these very airbrushed sketches of this generic woman’s body, and people would point to their abdomen and say, “You may have hair here. Or you may experience weight gain here”. But I wasn’t seeing it, and it wasn’t a conscious thing, but I know that it definitely built on the shame that I already felt about it. And so, well, I’m nearly 30 now, so when I started this project, it was more than 10 years after my initial diagnosis and I was like, okay; now I am kind of at a point in my life where I can be honest about my condition. I’m not as embarrassed about it anymore. Mostly because I did so much work to inform myself, but I was like, how could I make some kind of resource that could potentially not be the resource but act as a framework or template for resources around conditions that are not spoken about enough? So, I chose PCOS because that’s something personal to me, and I really care about women’s health. I don’t think there are enough resources out there about it where it’s spoken about, honestly. You know what I mean? Where it’s not brushed over. Look at the research – you see that 10% of women have PCOS. And it’s the leading cause of infertility – but why don’t we know more about it then? And why is it only a topic when it comes to infertility? I don’t know about your experience, but when I was 16, and I was diagnosed with it, they kind of said, just see how you go, and when you’re thinking about having kids in the future, then we’ll start looking at solutions. But I have to live with my body every day.

 

SIOBHA: Yeah, like, this is a chronic condition which fundamentally affects a very vital set of organs and my day-to-day functioning, and you’re seriously not going to help me or support me through this? As a medical professional?

 

CELIA: Exactly! And the research shows that people with PCOS experience anxiety and depression because those things are affected by their hormones. It’s a metabolic disease; your hormones are affected, so your mental health is going to be affected. Your reproductive health is going to be affected. You’re going to be affected in terms of your chances of developing diabetes. So why is it that I have to wait until I want to have kids? Is that all my body is for? And that is the whole thing about women’s health. It’s not just about having children. It’s about the body that is supposed to get you through life. And if it’s a bit too embarrassing, or it doesn’t really fit into the social standard of what a woman’s body is supposed to look like, let’s not talk about it too much. Just go and get some sort of hair removal. Or exercise more. Or change your diet. Change your lifestyle. No, it’s not that easy. It’s something that just needs to be spoken about more in general. Just try to dismantle a little bit of the shame so that people can engage with their health more constructively, not from a place of shame but from a place of information.

 

SIOBHA: Absolutely. You would like to think that the systems in place would support

people’s fundamental human right to health care over an individual physician’s comfort.

 

CELIA: Yes, exactly!

In the final part of our interview, Celia discusses the role of medical illustrators in combating racism in medical textbooks and offers advice to aspiring artists.

 

Find Celia Online:

Instagram: @c.m.c.c.d.e.s.i.g.n

Website: CMCC Design & Illustration