Woman's Hour - Covid in India; Susan Rogers, Prince's sound engineer; panic attacks; the novel Careless

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

India remains in the grip of a Covid crisis with record numbers of cases being reported every day. Oxygen and vaccines are running out and hospitals are overwhelmed. Save The Children has warned it could be facing thousands of additional deaths among children under five and an increase in maternal deaths, as hospitals and clinics are directing most of its staff and medicines to coping with Covid-19 patients. We hear from Dr Rajesh Khanna about the work he is doing to help women and children access vital healthcare. And here in the UK thousands of people continue to worry about the safety and well-being of their loved ones in India. Surya Elango a community reporter at BBC Radio Sheffield joins Anita to share those broader concerns and also the story of her own mother who has been in India since December looking after her elderly parent.Susan Rogers tells us what it was like working with the 80s pop artist Prince as his sound engineer on albums including ‘Purple Rain, ‘Around the World in a Day and ‘Sign o’ the Times’. After two decades in the music industry Susan Rogers left and went on to earn a doctorate in psychology. She’s now a professor of music at Berklee College in Boston, and is being awarded the Music Producers Guild’s ‘Outstanding Contribution to Music’– the first woman to ever win the award.‘Careless’ is the debut novel by Kirsty Capes and tells the story of Bess a girl in foster care and looks at the treatment of girls in the care system. Kirsty Capes was herself a care leaver and tells us about her PHD which examines the representation of care experienced children in contemporary fiction. She explains why she would like to see better portrayal in the media of people growing up in care and what it was like working under the supervision of Booker prize winning author Bernadine Evaristo. And the mental health blogger and author of ‘We're All Mad Here’, Claire Eastham has now written a new book, ‘F**K I Think I'm Dying: How I learned to live with panic’. She explains how she manages her own panic attacks which she’s had for nearly a decade. She joins Anita with psychotherapist Dawn Estefan to discuss panic attacks, why we have them, how they feel and how best to cope with them.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Rabeka Nurmahomed

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Good morning, we've made it to another Friday. Little man coming Baby, you're much too fast Why are we playing Prince? Do we need an excuse? Delighted to let you know we're going to be joined by Dr Susan Rogers, Prince's sound engineer, for some of his greatest works.

Purple Rain, Sign of the Times, The Black Album Parade, to name a few. Not only was she a woman in a man's world, she was completely self-taught. Then after 20 years in the music industry, she left and went off to study psychology. So have any of you had a major gear change in your life? We'd love to hear about it. We're also going to be discussing panic attacks today with Claire Easton, who's written a book all about them. Have you ever experienced them? How terrifying was it? Do you have mechanisms in place to cope? You can text us. It's 84844. Text will be charged at your standard message rate. And of course, you can get in touch via

social media. It's at BBC Woman's Hour or email charged at your standard message rate. And of course, you can get in touch via social media. It's at BBC Woman's Hour or email us throughout the programme by going to our website. We're also going to be talking about our perceptions of children in care and the care system. There's a new novel out which is trying to redress the balance of how the system is viewed. Now, while we are working our way out of the pandemic, finally able to breathe a sigh of relief, meeting up with people, getting vaccinated, looking forward to the summer, maybe making tentative holiday plans. A human disaster is unravelling in India as coronavirus is rapidly spreading and the country is unable to cope. It's devastating to watch the news.

But for those of us with friends and family living there, it's earth shattering and we feel completely helpless. I speak to my mum almost every night about it. And the other night we were talking and she had phoned her friend in Delhi who has a daughter my age who's been sick with coronavirus for 11 days. And she just said to my mum, we need your prayers. But India needs much more than prayers right now, with record numbers of cases being counted every day. The media is reporting that oxygen and vaccines are running out and hospitals are overwhelmed. But the charity Save the Children has warned

it could be facing thousands of additional deaths among children under five, and an increase in maternal deaths as hospitals and clinics are directing virtually all their staff and medicines to coping with COVID-19 patients. Well, I'm joined by Dr Rajesh Khanna, Deputy Director of Health and Nutrition at Save the Children in India, to find out more. Welcome to Women's Hour, Rajesh. Where are you and what's the situation?

Yeah, thank you. I'm working with Save the Children as the Deputy Director and I'm based in Delhi. But we have programs running across 14 states of the country. And our motto is to reach the most marginalized children and their families. And we know about the devastating impacts of the virus. But how is it impacting children with so many adults and caregivers and parents falling ill? You are absolutely right. You know, if you see the situation, we have close to 3.5 to 400,000 cases

every day, nearly 3.5 million cases, active cases of infection and 4,000 deaths that are being reported in the media. So, you know, with parents either being hospitalized or children becoming orphaned or parents remaining in isolation or in quarantine, the status of the children is really bad.

And what we are seeing is a multidimensional impact on their health, whether it's related to their physical health, mental, social or emotional well-being. In terms of the physical health, it's probably, we know that children are also being impacted with the COVID, but not to that extent. And to, you know, to aggravate the situation is also the fact that the access to essential services has been badly hit. On the second hand, you know, your social and emotional support, which the parents are supposed to be giving all the caregivers. The children have been locked up in houses for close to more than one and a half years now. And with the loss of the social and emotional support at home now, the parents also being impacted.

It's having a terrible situation. And who's looking after the vulnerable children? At this point of time, it's, you know, the community seems to have come together along with the government and civil society organizations. Somewhere it's your neighbors, somewhere it's your friends which are helping out, somewhere it's your civil society organizations and non-governmental organizations working and together with the government. Within Save the Children also, you know, we have been receiving SOS calls for children who need this. So our idea is not only to provide them with the food and protection services, but also to link up with the child rights structures that are existing in our country. And how easy is it to identify these children?

The challenge is that whatever helplines, there are child helplines in our different states and also at the national level, then there are child protection services working over time. But to be honest, you know, what we are finding is that the numbers is quite big and probably we are not able to catch up all these cases. Because it's a vast country with a huge population. And Rajesh, you're in Delhi, and you're talking about people who are calling Save the Children. These are people who are aware of Save the Children,

who have access to be able to, I mean, everybody has a mobile phone, but who actually know that they can pick up the phone and contact you. What about in rural India? What's happening to children in those parts? See, the situation out in India is now we know that it's the bigger metropolitan cities and the tier one cities which have been impacted and slowly the infection is gradually moving down

to smaller towns and the rural hinterland. But what we are realising is that even in the big cities, it is the most marginalised and vulnerable population living in slums which are being impacted. So I don't think the situation back in rural areas will be very much different. But you can't tell it because we don't have the data to show that these children are being impacted much worse as compared to the vulnerable population living in the urban slums. And as a doctor who works for Save the Children, how concerned are you about what's going to happen to a lot of these vulnerable children?

See, what we have seen, you know, presently we don't have the data, but the data that we had from last year and based on the two internal reports that we did and some reports that have come, some researches that have been done, that the impact is again multidimensional. So there has been not only the access to health has been impacted, the health system is already overstretched. And what we are realizing is that the ability to provide the essential services like routine immunization, care for the children with pneumonia and diarrhea, and we know that more than 60% of our population is dependent on the public health system.

So those things are being impacted to a great extent. The second impact, what we are really seeing now is the impact on the economic and the nutrition security and the livelihoods of the people. Sure, absolutely. And what about the impacts on pregnant women? We're talking about the children. What about access to healthcare and their needs?

I've been watching lots of reports on various news channels and I saw a woman on the news who had just given birth 24 hours earlier. She was sitting in the back of an auto rickshaw, a tuk-tuk. Her husband was holding the baby, one day old, and she had COVID and she couldn't get into the hospital. Just what what how is the health care coping with women who have either given birth or are pregnant? You know, as I just shared that probably all your essential services are impacted in a big way.

So whether it's your routine care of the pregnant woman, your birthing in an institutional mechanism where the government of India has been pushing hard, or the routine care of the mother and the baby just after delivery, which we call the postnatal care, all these services have been impacted in a big way. Just to give you one information, you know, just last year only, based on the phase one of the lockdown, there was a research done, which showed that in India, with this varying levels of service being hindered, which ranges from 10% to maybe 50%, the number of additional maternal deaths in our country could reach a figure somewhere between 3,000 to 15,000. And that was last year? Over a six month. And that was last year when it wasn't even that bad? Yes. And unfortunately,

you see, you know, the time period that we have received, you know, even before the impact of the first lockdown was over, you know,

you have this now second wave coming, which is really, you know, put the entire health system on the brink of collapse. What are you seeing,

Rajesh? You are there. You're in Delhi, you're working, you're a doctor, you're working in the field, you're working with children. Just paint a picture for us. What are you seeing on a daily basis? See, what I'm seeing is that yes, the health system is quite overstretched. It's not only the facilities and the services being prioritised towards COVID care, but we are also seeing a number of health workers falling sick because of COVID. Whether it's your government civil society organizations private organizations all of them coming together working together with to ensure that we fight this pandemic as bravely as possible and you know to put up a resilience

and to support each other even though you are all working from within the homes. Whatever we can do remotely is something that we have all been trying to do. Okay, Rajesh, thank you very much for speaking to us this morning. That was Rajesh Khanna talking to us from Save the Children in Delhi. Now, here in the UK, thousands of people continue to worry about the safety and well-being of their loved ones in India. Saria Elango is a community reporter at BBC Radio Sheffield, and she joins me now to share the broader concerns she's been made aware of within the community she works with, but also to talk about her own mum who's in India. Saria, welcome to Woman's Hour.

Why is your mum in India? She went in December, didn't she? Hi, Anita. Yeah, so my mum's a consultant anaesthetist at the Women's Hospital in Liverpool. So she was working here on the front line right from the start of the pandemic last year. And then I think when you're working in an environment like that, in a hospital like that, you're seeing new mothers, newborn babies. And I think I think that really pulled on her heartstrings. So that paired with, you know, going through a pandemic and speaking to other colleagues about not being able to see their parents and the struggles of social distancing.

I think she just thought, right, I need to get on the first flight back to India to go see my mum, look after her. She's elderly. The thing in India is it's not like the UK. It's not built on a culture of care homes for the elderly. You know, you have to rely on yourself or your extended family. And all our family are here. So my mum just felt really guilty and just nervous about my grandma navigating a pandemic world in India.

So she flew out and she's been there for about six months so far in a place called E Road. Where is that? Is that in South India, in Tamil Nadu? It's in South India, yeah, in Tamil Nadu. And how worried were you when she did that? I'm going to be quite candid. Initially, I wasn't that worried because at the time, the cases weren't like they are now. And, you know, we had

Prime Minister Modi saying, you know, India's doing really well. They've saved humanity from a big disaster by containing the virus. And my mum was going to a rural area and I didn't really think she'd be majorly affected. Obviously, things have changed so much now. And, yeah, I'm incredibly worried because we're hearing about underreporting. And, you know, two thirds of the Indian population live in rural areas. And actually, probably a lot of this underreporting is happening there. And I read somewhere that it's probably 10 to 30 times the rate that it actually is.

It's just not being shown. So, yeah, I'm really worried. And you've been in regular contact with your mum and talking to her. In fact, here's a clip of you talking to her just a few days ago. Let's have a listen. How possible is it to socially distance? People are still trying to do social distancing, but people all need to go out to buy their groceries, vegetables and then other shops. It's all crowded anyway.

People are really trying hard to comply with the rules and regulations, but it is difficult. A lot of people, they don't understand the seriousness of social distancing. Still, like any other country, here also people have this conspiracy theories and don't believe in COVID and they are worried about their their livelihood I am worried about my mum and I'm worried that if something happens to her whether I'll be able to return that quickly it's scary and it is worrying I am just feeling satisfied that I have spent some quality time with her it's very moving to listen to your mum and she's worried about her mum but actually she's on her feeling satisfied that I have spent some quality time with her. It's very moving to listen to your mum.

And she's worried about her mum. But actually, she's on her way back now, isn't she? Yes, she's on a flight right now. And she will have to, yeah, she'll have to isolate, won't she, when she gets back. What your mum is talking about, at least your mum is there. She's spent some time with her mum. She's on her way back. There'll be lots of people from the diaspora in the UK worried about their own families. And you've been talking to people in the community, haven't you? What have they

been telling you? Yeah, I mean, there are so many parallels with my mum's story. You know, it's a big part of BME families to have maybe a grandparent or an uncle or an aunt living in a different country. So, yeah, I'm hearing this story again and again and again. One member of the family going back to India, getting stuck there and really being in an emotional limbo. Do you stay in India and look after that person or do you leave? Because it's not safe right now. And yeah, I've heard that from all sorts of people nearby in Doncaster a friend of mine she's in her uh 20s and you know she has the same situation with her grandma she was going to take time out to go see her to spread her grandfather's ashes they can't do anything

like that so it's it's a really emotional time um yeah people feel stuck between what to do absolutely and like you say and it's affecting the diaspora, which is all over the world. I'm pleased that your mum is on her way home and she'll be back with you very soon. Surya, thank you very much for joining us on Woman's Hour to talk about it. If you would like to get in touch,

if any of that resonated with you or you'd like to share your thoughts and feelings about any of this, then please do contact us. It's at BBC Woman's Hour on social media or you can drop us a text. It's 84844. There he is again. My arms are in the air in the studio.

Now, what is it like to be present as pop history is being recorded? Someone who knows only too well is Susan Rogers. She sat on the other side of the glass from Prince as he recorded many of his classic albums, including Purple Rain, this one, Around the World in a Day and Sign of the Times. She was Prince's sound engineer in the 80s and in an extraordinary career also worked with David Byrne,

the Barenaked Ladies and Jeff Black. Then in 2000, after two decades, she quit the industry to earn a doctorate in psychology and she's now a professor of music at Berkeley College in Boston and is being awarded the Music Producers Guild's Outstanding Contribution to Music. The first woman to ever win the award, no less. Just the kind of woman we love on Woman's Hour.

And Dr Susan Rogers joins me now, bright and very early from Boston. Very good morning to you, Susan. We will discuss you breathing the same air as Prince in a moment, but I want to go back to the start of your career, because you dropped out of school at 16 and you're entirely self-taught. Yes. Well, first off, good morning and thank you for having me here. It's lovely to be here and talking with you. Yeah, I came from a family that was lower middle class, so college was out of the question. We all kind of had to fend for ourselves. And I knew I had this deep desire, this passion to somehow be involved in record making. I was one of those kids who was just crazy about records. Kids like that will sometimes go on to become a DJ or they might become a music executive. But in my case, I felt the calling to be, you know, boots on the ground in the control room where records were made.

So I had to learn a skill and then I worked my way up. And where did that desire come from? Because like you say, you know, when at that time you listen to music, most people either want to be a DJ or be the lead singer of a band. Why sound engineering in particular? Who knows? That is such a good question. And I do believe that little children

know who they are down deep inside, know their aptitudes, their skills. They kind of know what street they live on. That was the term that Prince called it, the street you live on. You kind of know who you are. And I felt like being a performer, a songwriter, that wasn't for me. I didn't feel attracted to that. What I felt attracted to was the art of

making records. And I kind of knew that I had a technical mind and that maybe if I walked down that road, I could be of service. And this is a service-oriented profession. Bringing music into the world is a little bit like being a midwife as it gets born. Oh, I love that analogy, like a midwife born in music. So how did you get your first foot in the door? Because obviously there weren't that many women doing this. No, I got started in something that was even more rare than engineering, which is being an audio technician. But an audio technician is an objective standard. If your tape machine or your console is broken,

if someone can come in with the schematics and the toolkit and the oscilloscope and fix it, we're done. We don't have to have arguments about whether it would be better to have a man or a woman or an older person or a younger person repair it. So getting my entree in the business as an audio technician served me really well. It was actually a tech that Prince was looking for. When I heard about the job opening with Prince, he wasn't looking for an engineer.

He needed a technician, and that happened to be what I'd been doing for five years out in Hollywood. So how did that union come about? Let's talk about Prince. Let's talk about you being in the same atmosphere as the great man himself. Well, he sent out the word to his management that he was looking for an audio technician because he had just come off the 1999 tour. He had just had his first crossover pop hit single with Little Red Corvette. He was planning the Purple Rain album and the movie,

and he needed someone to come to Minneapolis and get his home studio working properly and help with the technical aspect of that. As soon as I heard that that's what he was looking for, I knew immediately that's my job. He liked working with women. He did, yeah. I was a huge Prince fan. I had seen him live. I had all his records and we were a good fit for each other. So I got the job and he moved me from the technician role into the

engineering chair. I mean, he's famously forward thinking and particularly, like you say, he would like to work with women. He surrounded himself by women, whether it was professionally or romantically. So how did that dynamic work? Well, Prince was, because he was a self-made man, he was really good at recognizing raw talent in others. And he could kind of read people. He could see, it seemed like anyway, it seemed like he had magical powers. It seemed like he could read what we wanted and what we were made of. So he was really good at putting people in roles that would bring out the best performance we could give. My friend Wendy Melvoin joined his band as the guitar player when she was 18 years old, just fresh out of school. And Wendy is an incredibly accomplished

musician today. Prince saw that in her. Same thing with Lisa Coleman and with me and with Peggy McCreary, with Sheila E., with the other women he worked with. We felt supported. We felt respected. And most of all, this word gets used a lot, but we felt empowered, literally. It's like he handed you the reins and didn't watch you drive. He didn't micromanage. Here, you do this. This is your job.

I'm going to go do my job. I'm sure you'll be fine. That's incredibly empowering. Oh, it sounds amazing. But there's still so few women working in the field of sound engineering. Have things changed, do you think, in the last 20 years? They do. They do change with the times a little bit. We know that, for example, the Music Producers Guild, the Music Producers Guild and the PPL, the Phonographic Performance Limited, the folks who

are giving me this award, they have told me that membership in the Music Producers Guild females is up to 13% now, which it doesn't seem to be 5%. Just five years ago, it was 5%. It's more than doubled. So there seems to be a spreading activation of young women seeing more and more role models out there and realising, yeah, this is within reach, I can do this. It's growing slowly. It's growing. So maybe lots of young women listening to Woman's Hour now

are being inspired. I want to move on to the second half of your career because in 2000, having all the success, and you've worked with some great artists, including David Byrne, but you decided to leave and go back into studying and study psychology why? I felt a calling and the calling was similar to what I had felt when I was a child and wanted to be in music I had a profound curiosity about the natural world and I wanted to study consciousness in non-human animals I wanted to study neuroscience so I-human animals. I wanted to study neuroscience.

So I had a hit record with Barenaked Ladies from Canada in 1998. And with that hit record, I had enough money that I could start a whole new path in life. It turned out that since I got my PhD when I was 52 years old, I wasn't going to have a long science career, but by studying music perception and cognition, I can now talk about record making from two perspectives, the art of it and also the science of it. And we're talking about why people like what they like and why people choose one record and not another record and why we all have these different appetites for music. That's endlessly fascinating. Did you want to pursue psychology because you'd spent so much time with very interesting personalities and huge egos? No, no, I did not. I wasn't interested so much in individual psychology as, I guess I'm a born engineer because I'm interested in the system,

the nuts and bolts, the neuroscience. That's the thing that I enjoy studying the most. So Susan, for women who are interested in this area, what would your advice be to them today? First thing is that it's very competitive and you have to know your craft. You have to spend years honing your craft. I have a friend who's a sculptor and he says to me, craft is what sustains you when art fails you, which it will 90% of the time. So the skills required in this business to make records are pretty vast. You need to know a lot of musical skills and a lot of technical skills. So that's the first piece of advice is really learn your craft. And second, I would advise young women to recognize that there are more supportive folks out there than abusive folks.

If they're afraid of being exploited or being taken advantage of for their gender. They need to overcome that fear. My entire career was made possible from the men and women who supported me, believed in me, encouraged me, made it possible for me to be successful in this business. There are more of those out there than there are the abusers. You hear the horror stories. If you encounter one of those, get away. Don't think that that's your only chance to be successful in this business. It's not. Dr. Susan Rogers, congratulations once again, and thank you very much for speaking to us. Inspiring. And if you want to hear more from Susan Rogers and the talents of Prince, just go to BBC Sounds and search for the Archive on 4 programme, A Night with Prince.

Now Careless tells the story of Bess, a girl in foster care who falls pregnant at 15, and her friend Eshal, whose parents want her to have an arranged marriage. The novel is about friendship as well as the treatment of girls in the care system. The debut novel is written by Kirsty Capes, herself a care leaver, who would like to see better representation in the media of people growing up in care and she's just completed her PhD which examines the representation of care experienced children in contemporary fiction under the supervision of Booker Prize winning author Bernadine Evaristo no less and she joins us now to tell us all about it. Welcome, congratulations on the book first of all Kirsty. Why did you want to write this story?

Hi, Anita. Thanks for having me on. So I think for me, I've always been a really big myself reflected back at me in the fiction that I was reading in terms of my care experience. So what I really wanted to do was write something that felt true to me and true to my experience and tell a story that, you know, felt I felt that I could reflect myself back through that book. So really, it was quite a cathartic experience in that sense, you know, to be able to process some of the stuff from my care experience. And so what were the sorts of stories that you were seeing that weren't reflective of your own experience? Well I think a lot of the very very big books that are out there are quite often not written by people who have care experience which I think is fine but I think it's really important to have care experience voices in the mainstream as well and I think a lot of the time fiction that does deal with the care experience can focus on the negative aspects of that experience.

So going into care, you are sort of set up with a series of disadvantages just for the fact of being in care. And I saw a lot of the time that these negative aspects of the care experience were kind of being reinforced in the fiction. So really I wanted to tell a story that didn't really shy away from the negative aspects of the care experience, but also celebrated it as well. Absolutely, because Bess becomes pregnant at 15, doesn't she? Yeah, yeah, she does, yeah. So girls that are in care are more likely to become pregnant as teenagers. But, you know, that is kind of the hook of the story.

But I wanted to focus on Bess's aspirations and hopes and dreams, as well as, you know, some of those other experiences that are associated with being in foster care. And Bess is taken into foster care at four and you were taken into care at the age of two. Can you tell me a little bit about your own story? Yeah, absolutely. So as you say, I was taken into care at two and I was taken into one short term foster placement for about six months. And then I was moved to a long-term foster placement so for me my story of how I moved through care is quite unusual because I did I had the two placements and the second placement is a placement that I stayed at until I aged out of the system which is quite unusual so really my experience was quite stable and positive and I I had really loving foster parents who raised me.

But, you know, that is not the case. I'm sort of the exception to the rule in that respect. Lots of people that go through the system have very different, very disruptive experience. Because you had stability. Yes, exactly. Yes. And how unusual is that? it is unusual so I think a lot of the um a lot of the kind of statistical disadvantages that care experience people have can be related back to uh you know um insecurity and placements and being moved between lots of different

placements so for example care experience of different placements. So for example, care experience people are less likely to access higher education. And you can draw a line from that to, you know, children who are in care who perhaps have to move placements a lot and are moving schools and have that kind of disrupted education. So in that sense, I was very lucky that I was able to, you know, stay in one placement, have that stability and then, you know, have been through the care system end up in prison or teenage pregnancies. What changes do you think need to be made to address some of this? I think that the main thing for me, I think there's lots of things that could be changed in terms of policy and how the system works, bureaucracy, etc. But I think for me, something that's overlooked a lot when talking about children in care, and the care system is the idea of love, you know, there's, there's not very much care at the centre of the care system. And I think sometimes it can also,

it can almost become quite transactional. And I think, I think there needs to be more focus among people working in social care social workers local authority councils foster cares and how they're trained there needs to be a focus on love and I think with more love in the system becomes it becomes a more positive and more hopeful experience for the children that go through it. And you recently accessed your own care files for the first time. How was that experience? It's been quite a strange one. So I started accessing my files in early 2020. And what I've had is kind of batches of PDFs getting sent to me every month, because there's so many files, thousands and thousands of pages, they can't send it all in one go. So they're sending me batches. And the thing that most surprised me really was how much

of it was redacted. And I think because I was in care at such a young age, I was taken into care, there are huge gaps in my memory about you know what happened to me and those very early years in my life and what I was hoping for with accessing my care files is perhaps to fill some of those gaps and I'm not sure really whether you know I've achieved that with the with the files that I've accessed so far. But in other ways, there are things in there that I found really helpful and have kind of helped me build up this story about myself that I didn't have before. So it's been, yeah, a really strange experience. Yeah, what a year for you accessing your care files, living through a pandemic like the rest

of us, and writing your debut novel. And may I just add, having your PhD supervised by Bernadine Evaristo. Hello. How was that experience? Yeah, crazy. I mean, I started my PhD about five years ago. So I sort of worked with Bernadine mostly before the Booker win. But yes, as you can imagine, she's absolutely incredible. She's absolutely the master of her craft, so generous with her time and her advice. And I mean, Careless was the book that I wrote as part of my PhD and that it would be nothing what it is now without Bernadine's advice. She was just incredible. Kirsty, lovely speaking to you. Best of luck with the book. Thank you so much. That's

Kirsty Capes and the book is Careless. Now mental health blogger and author of We're All Mad Here, Claire Easton has now written a new book, F Word, I Think I'm Dying, How I Learned to Live with Panic. Claire has suffered from panic attacks for nearly a decade. She says panic is something I live with like IBS or eczema. And she joins me now with psychotherapist dawn estafan to discuss panic attacks why we have them how we feel and how best to cope with them 84844 is the number to text and lots of you are already texting in um we've just had a message here saying i used to have panic attacks in my 20s i overcame them by learning to not be frightened of the symptoms racing heart feeling as if I was going to faint and just let it happen. I was so sick of it happening. And I thought the worst that could happen would be I'd faint.

So I used to say, do your worst. I'm not frightened anymore. And they quite quickly stopped happening. And that's from Helen. Morning to both of you. Claire, let's bring you in. You were nodding away whilst I was reading that message. Let's start with for lots of people who haven't suffered a panic attack, what is a panic attack? Oh, well, a panic attack is literally fear incarnate. It's like having liquid terror injected into your veins. I always liken it to, do you know that moment when you almost fall down the stairs

and you get that overwhelming fear of the shock? Yeah, your legs turn to jelly a little bit. Yeah, you get that overwhelming feeling of the shock yeah your legs your legs turn to jelly a little bit yeah you get that cold sweat your heart's pounding and you can't quite catch your breath and it's really really scary for a moment but then you think oh I'm okay and we carry on well a panic attack is that sensation but it builds and builds and it doesn't stop and it continues to the extent that it is overwhelming and the symptoms can feel quite violent at times. Describe your first major panic attack. Where were you? What happened? How did it feel?

Well, I'd been living with undiagnosed social anxiety for about 10 years when I had my first panic attack. And I went into a meeting room to interview for a promotion. And I knew something was wrong. It was this sensation that something wasn't quite right, but I sat down and thought, it's okay, you know, we can pull this together. And then I felt this kind of warm, not unpleasant sensation oozing around my body, which I now know was adrenaline.

And the moment that it hit my heart it absolutely exploded and it was pounding against my rib cage I was sweating my eyesight went blurry my limbs were numb my mouth was dry and oh and I couldn't yeah couldn't catch a breath and it was this absolute spiral of I think I'm going to die I I think I'm going crazy. I think I'm having a stroke. And in that moment, it didn't matter that I'd spent weeks preparing for this interview. I didn't care about making a fool of myself anymore. I stood up, left the room, left the office and ran all the way down the street. That was it. Panicked out of there. And since then, you've spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened to you, what was going on in your body, what made you get there to that point. I've written this brilliant book about it. And your tone of voice is fantastic,

by the way. I mean, it is you. Now that I've met you and I'm hearing you speak, that is the voice that comes through. And you're very matter of fact, very funny even, the way you talk about it. What is the science science what's going on in our minds as somebody full disclosure who has suffered three in the last few years i am very attentive i'm all ears i've done no work on trying to understand them so you're going to explain now what's the science well knowledge is power to me you know it really is a way of building confidence. Once you understand something, it grounds you. I really believe that.

And a panic attack, in a sense, is a miscommunication between kind of reality and the rational brain and the amygdala in the brain, which is responsible for the fight or flight response. Now, this is completely natural. I always say to people, the fight or flight response keeps us alive this is completely natural. I always say to people, the fight or flight response keeps us alive. You know, it's evolutionary. It's why we can identify and respond so quickly to danger. To use the stairs analogy again, you know, if you do nearly fall on the stairs, you just, and suddenly you grab the banister and you've not even thought about it, you just do it and these symptoms happen you think oh gosh that was that was a close call but if that happens in the supermarket

or a meeting room suddenly the rational brain can't quite equate what's happened you know it's been triggered in error almost so there's almost this battle between the two parts of the brain. We're desperately trying to understand what's happening. And because you can't see an external threat, you might think it's internal. And that's why thoughts of I'm having a stroke, I'm having a heart attack occur, which then goes straight back to the amygdala, who then re-triggers another panic attack because it thinks you're in danger again. And it's this kind of storm of activity and confusion. Well, lots of people are getting in touch with their own experiences, but I want to bring Dawn in here because, Dawn, morning.

Claire has obviously made herself an expert on it, written a brilliant book about it. Is that what we should all be doing if we've suffered them? We should gen up and make ourselves experts. What's the first step for anybody listening now who might have suffered their first or someone has said in 2018 my daughter had a fierce attack during her a levels she came home gray-lipped and exhausted the next day had physical bruising on her chest and they stopped after her exams what advice what what lessons do we need to learn what advice can

you give well i think what claire's been doing it really is at the heart of how to deal with panic attacks you know there's a saying there's nothing to fear but fear itself I think one of the things that in any condition mental health condition that you maybe experience is to self-empower empowerment feel that you can do something feel that you can get on top of the problem you know when you look at the word attack in a panic attack, an attack implies a fast, dramatic and intense response. So bearing that in mind, we have to arm ourselves. And you arm yourself with educating yourself about the condition

and reaching out for help. Claire, you talk about triggers. Explain how they work and how you deal with them. So a trigger is, you know, an emotional response to a moment where you felt threatened. And for me, it was meeting rooms because I had my first ever attack in a meeting room. It started off when I returned to work after I had a leave of absence that anything any meeting room would trigger an attack because my amygdala now associated that with danger. So Dawn what should I mean if like Claire you are if it's a meeting room or you know the office

space or whatever that trigger might be should you if it's a place of work should you talk to your boss should you speak to your employer what should you do i just wanted to add before i answer that question that actually not all panic attacks have triggers and i think that's what makes them so tricky some of them they come on suddenly without warning and others are triggered by certain situations so that's also worth noting as well in terms of letting your employee know, I think that's a very individual decision to make. As a psychotherapist who really advocates for destigmatising mental health, I'd say yes, make sure that everyone knows and actually help to educate those around you about the condition. However, there are some organisations out there that are still not on point in terms of working with mental health or understanding the needs of people who work for

them with mental health. And there are other organisations that have it embedded in the organisation's culture. What I would say is most important is, if you cannot discuss that at work, is to make sure that you have support around you or an environment around you where you can discuss what you're going through because it's really important to have support with issues such as these and if someone came to you very quickly and with a panic attack what's the first bit of advice you'd give them um well if someone came to me with uh talking about experiencing panic attacks we'd start to look at ways that they could they could get some help so we we could talk about psychotherapy such as what I do we could have an

immersive kind of exploration around what the relationship between fear and past history narratives are we could look at things like cognitive behavioral therapy which apparently has like a 20 percent lapse rate which is so very good but we can also look at things like speaking to our GPs about medication to have many things to help us to deal with symptomology or looking at more holistic things like meditation or grounding exercises things that we can practice for ourselves at home most important thing is is to get help brilliant thank you both for talking to me. That's Claire Easton, whose book is out now, and Dawn Estefan. That's all for today's Woman's Hour.

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