“Every symptom of PCOS really chips away at a woman’s identity and how she identifies as a woman,” Hawkes reveals. “It can make women hairy or overweight or have acne or lose their hair or unable to get pregnant. These are all things we associate with femininity and womanhood.”And beyond its physical manifestations, the psychological and emotional impact on patients can be devastating.“We’ve got people who write to us [at Verity] saying ‘I’ve not left the house in months because I’m too ashamed of how I look’,” she says. “One woman brought me to tears in her message, because she said her fiancé caught her trying to crack open a battery in the bathroom because she was gonna use the acid on her skin to remove the hair, because she’d rather have scarring than hair. When you’re driven to that extreme, it’s soul-destroying.”As with many other health issues related to the female reproductive organs and body, there is still a lot of stigma surrounding PCOS. As Hawkes points out, weight gain, hair loss and periods are not often deemed as sexy topics to talk about.In addition, the condition is wrongfully often discarded as not being a serious health issue. While things like acne might be seen as cosmetic, PCOS is not, Hawkes says, because the condition also puts women at risk of developing long-term health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer.Ahead of PCOS Awareness Month, this September, we asked the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists to tell us a bit more about the symptoms to look out for. Click through for what Professor Adam Balen, the chair of the British Fertility Society , told us...