For many years, Rochelle Lewis, from Wolverhampton, struggled with facial hair growth, painful periods and anxiety.

“I’ve always struggled with a lot of facial hair growing up, it was something I was really bullied about, so I tried to do absolutely everything I could to try and get rid of it,” she explained.

“One of my mum’s friends, she was like, ‘oh, maybe she’s got PCOS’. So that was the first time I’d ever even heard of it, and I was probably about 16.”

Rochelle said she first raised concerns about PCOS as a teenager, but felt they were dismissed.

“So I went to the doctors and they literally just brushed it off and were like, ‘no, we don’t think you’ve got PCOS’,” she said.

The 31-year-old was finally diagnosed with the condition in 2025, a process she described as “frustrating”.

“It was emotionally draining, not to be listened to, not to be heard,” she said.

Now a mother to a seven-month-old son, she said too often women were diagnosed and then left to navigate the condition alone.

The name change alone wasn’t enough, she added.

“So you get told, you get given your diagnosis and that’s it… we’re just left to it,” she said.

“We need to have processes put in place to actually help us.”