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Rachel Weiss started a global menopause movement to foster discussion around the change that all women experience as they get older. When one British woman realized there was a deafening silence around menopause, she decided to start the conversation. sometime counsellor Rachel Weiss was 50 when she sat down with her husband in February 2017 to watch a BBC documentary about menopause. “I thought, ‘Well, it’s going to happen to me sometime, so I might as well watch it,' recalls Weiss, a psychotherapeutic counsellor based in Perth, Scotland. “What struck me was all these different symptoms I’d never heard of. I just thought, ‘Period, period, period,’ then it stops, and I might get some hot flashes and that was the extent of my knowledge. And the second point was ‘Why does nobody talk about this?’.” Weiss decided to do just that. She posted on Facebook asking whether any other local women had seen the documentary, and if they’d be interested in talking more about the menopause. Nearly 30 people showed up at Perth’s local Blend Coffee Lounge. “The buzz in the room was amazing,” recalls Weiss, now 57, who remembers how one local woman jumped in the car to join them after seeing the initiative mentioned on the local news. “She arrived just as we were packing up, so we stood on the pavement chatting to her.”
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Weiss hosted the first-ever Menopause Cafe in Perth Scotland in 2017. Since then, the series of pop-up events known as Menopause CafΓ© has become a registered charity, with a growing team of volunteers who host meetings across the U.K., Canada, and the U.S.