Oriyali · a PMDD companion
For one or two weeks a month you stop being yourself, and then you’re fine, and then it comes back. This is a private place to work out whether that fortnight has a name — and an iPhone app that helps you prove it to a doctor.
Four minutes · nothing you answer leaves your device
The pattern
The fuse that’s suddenly an inch long. The fog that makes you read the same sentence four times. Crying at something that wouldn’t have touched you a week ago, then watching it all lift the day you start bleeding — and wondering whether you invented the whole thing. Somewhere in there, someone told you it was just PMS.
Four minutes.
Nothing you answer leaves your device.
The self-check
This is the PSST — a published screening tool for premenstrual disorders, reproduced here as written. It won’t diagnose you; nothing can, in four minutes.
What it will do is tell you whether what you live through each month is the kind of thing this instrument was built to catch, and give you language for it.
Nothing you answer here leaves your device.
Answer these for a typical bad week — the week or two before your period — not for today. The scoring rule is printed at the bottom, so you can read your own answers without anyone’s help.
This is the whole PSST rule, exactly as published. Nothing is weighted and there is no total score.
Your answers point toward PMDD if all three are true:
They point toward moderate to severe PMS if all three are true:
Either way it is a screening result, not a diagnosis — and the timing question at the top matters as much as the rest. If your symptoms never clear up after your period starts, say exactly that to a doctor.
Steiner M, Macdougall M, Brown E. The premenstrual symptoms screening tool (PSST) for clinicians. Archives of Women's Mental Health. 2003;6(3):203–209. View the paper. If you’re struggling right now, the crisis numbers are here.
The check-in
This is what a hard day looks like here.
A hand-drawn aura: a warm dusk and ochre bloom, with short, quiet petals, and the lines churn and break.
Try it — thirty seconds
This is the check-in from the app, running here in your browser. Nothing is submitted, saved or counted.
A bad day still gets a beautiful drawing. That’s deliberate.
Your cycle
Your cycle isn’t one weather system, it’s five. Most people are never taught which one they’re standing in, which is why the hard days feel like they arrive out of nowhere.
They don’t. They arrive on a schedule — and a schedule is something you can plan around. Scroll, and watch the light move.
01 · Days 1–5 · First light
Bleeding starts, and for a lot of people with PMDD the fog lifts within a day or two — sometimes almost the hour it begins. That relief is real, and it is also the clearest evidence you have. Symptoms that stop when bleeding starts are the pattern a doctor is listening for.
02 · Days 6–13 · Morning
Oestrogen climbs and, for most people, so does everything else. You feel like yourself. This is the stretch where the last two weeks stop seeming real, and where you quietly decide you were probably overreacting. You weren't. This is also the best week to book the appointment and to write yourself a note for later.
03 · Around day 14 · Noon
An egg is released, and this is usually the brightest, fullest few days of the month. It's brief. It matters mostly because of what comes next: ovulation is the starting gun for the luteal phase, which means it's the moment your hard days become predictable.
04 · Days 15–21 · Golden hour
Progesterone rises. Nothing has gone wrong yet, and for a few days you may not notice anything at all. This is the useful window — the days when you can still cook something, answer the difficult email, and tell the people around you what next week tends to look like.
05 · Days 22–28 · Dusk
This is the window. Hormones fall, and if you have PMDD your brain responds to that fall in a way most brains don't. The rage, the fog, the sense of being someone else — it lands here, and it lifts when you bleed. Knowing it is coming does not stop it. It does change what it costs you: you can clear the week, warn the people who need warning, and stop believing it's a verdict on who you are.
Getting believed
IAPMD’s global survey of people with premenstrual disorders puts the average wait for an accurate PMDD diagnosis at around twelve years. Twelve years is not a story about incompetent doctors. It’s a story about evidence: you turn up in the follicular phase, feeling fine, describing a fortnight you can barely remember, and there is nothing in the room to look at except you saying it.
There is nothing in the room to look at except you, saying it.
The waiting is not harmless. In a 2022 study of 599 people with prospectively confirmed PMDD, 34% reported having attempted suicide. We’re stating that plainly and once, because it is the reason the wait matters. If that is where you are right now, there are numbers here.
What changes the conversation is a daily record kept before the fact. A DSM-5 diagnosis of PMDD needs two cycles of daily ratings — not a memory, not a summary, but a rating made on the day. The standard form for it is the DRSP, the Daily Record of Severity of Problems. It looks like this.
Two consecutive cycles · prospective daily ratings · severity 1–6
Oriyali
Cycle 2 of 2
Daily symptom severity across one 28-day cycle. Each of six symptoms is rated 1–6 every day. Severity stays near 1 through the follicular phase, climbs steadily from about day 15, peaks at 5–6 across days 21–26, and drops back to 1 on day 27, when bleeding starts. That shape is the diagnosis.
Follicular mean (days 4–10)
1.1
Late luteal mean (days 21–26)
5.0
Change, luteal vs follicular
+355%
Prepared from the patient’s own prospective daily ratings. Educational summary only — not a diagnostic instrument and not a medical device. Diagnosis of PMDD per DSM-5 requires clinician assessment alongside a minimum of two cycles of prospective daily ratings.
Useful whether or not you ever install anything.
Everything on this page is educational — not a medical device, and not a diagnosis.
And if you want to keep going
Thirty seconds a day. Two cycles later you have the one thing the appointment has been missing.
It’s an iPhone app, built by one person. Thirty seconds a day of logging becomes three things: a warning before your next hard week, something to hold onto during it, and two cycles of DRSP a doctor will actually accept. That’s the whole product — and everything below is what it will not do to get there.
01
Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to insurers. No acquisition offer changes that.
02
There isn’t one in the app and there won’t be. No third-party analytics anywhere near a symptom.
03
It works with none at all. Sign in with Apple exists only if you want sync across devices.
04
No wearable, no subscription to start, and no login you’ll be quietly logged out of.
On your phone. Not on a server we can read, not in a warehouse, not in a dataset anyone can buy.
