Ep. 171 - Am I Losing My Mind or Is It Perimenopause? The Truth About Anxiety, ADHD, and Your Mental Health

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Agnes K. Simone, a board-certified psychiatrist and founder of Olea Women's Health in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. Dr. Simone specializes in integrative, hormone-informed psychiatric care for women navigating perimenopause, menopause, and midlife — a space she says is deeply underserved. After training at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute and the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center, Dr. Simone noticed a recurring gap in her practice: women were coming in with new anxiety, mood changes, and cognitive concerns, yet the hormonal connection was frequently being missed. That experience led her to found Olea Women's Health, a boutique practice designed to treat the whole picture — both the psychiatric and hormonal dimensions of midlife. We discuss what hormone-informed psychiatry actually means, why perimenopause is so often overlooked as a mental health inflection point, and what women deserve to know about the connection between hormones, mood, sleep, and cognition. Dr. Simone brings both clinical rigor and genuine warmth to this conversation, and her core belief is simple: women deserve care that takes their experiences seriously.