Woman's Hour - Cyntoia Brown-Long

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

In 2006 16 year old Cyntoia Brown was sentenced as an adult to life in prison for killing a man while she was a teenage sex trafficking victim. Granted clemency in January this year and released on August 7th she joins Jenni to discuss her childhood, what happened the day she shot Johnny Allen and the impact of 16 years in prison.Food writer, Sue Quinn’s latest book ‘Cocoa: An exploration of chocolate, with recipes’ illustrates how the story of chocolate includes economics and slavery, sex and desire, society and culture. ‘Cocoa’ reveals a wealth of cultural, historical and culinary information about chocolate through the ages and across the world. She joins Jenni in the studio to Cook the Perfect…Gorgonzola, walnuts, rosemary and chocolate.Over the past two years the charity Combat Stress has been running workshops across the country to help partners of veterans suffering from PTSD. But evidence suggests only a minority of partners seek support for themselves as there are many barriers to participation in workshops in the community especially if the veteran is undergoing treatment and isn’t well enough to be left. A new online programme has just been launched to address this - it’s the first of its kind in the UK and is designed to help partners who find it harder to leave the home due to carer roles, childcare and work pressures. In this final interview we hear from Elaine who was in the first cohort of the online treatment programme which finished in the summer. She’s been married for 31 years and her husband was in the military for 12 years and explains to reporter, Tamsin Smith how his PTSD dramatically worsened in 2015, almost three decades after he left the military service. Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Kirsty StarkeyInterviewed Guest: Cyntoia Brown-Long Photographer: Flip Holsinger Interviewed Guest: Sue Quinn Reporter: Tamsin Smith

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast. Good morning. In today's programme, Coco, an exploration of chocolate with recipes. Sue Quinn on the history and culture of the substance that's a simple treat, an aphrodisiac or, as the ancients saw it, a sacred gift from the gods. And she'll cook the perfect pasta with gorgonzola, walnuts, rosemary and chocolate. We'll hear from the last of the three military wives we've spoken to this week who've suffered

from secondary post-traumatic stress disorder and the serial, the final episode of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls. In 2006, a young woman was sentenced to life imprisonment in America, a term of 51 years for killing a man. Cyntoia Brown-Long was 16 when she shot Johnny Allen, and even though she was still a child, she was sentenced as an adult. Her case attracted a lot of attention when it was discovered she'd been a victim of sex trafficking. And after serving 15 years of her sentence,

she was granted clemency in January and then released on probation in August. She married the man she'd met through correspondence while she was in jail and was reconciled with the parents who'd adopted her as a baby. She's published a book called Free Sintoya, My Search for Redemption

in the American Prison System. She spoke to me from her home city of Nashville and we first discussed her childhood. When she was 12, she was charged with stealing and sent to an approved school. How did she go from being in the class for gifted and talented children to being in and out of the court system? You know, even though I had a good childhood environment at home with my parents, there was a lot of other things that I was experiencing in school among my peers that caused me to feel like an outcast, caused me to feel left out.

I started, you know, to develop this chip on my shoulder, started getting in trouble, talking back to teachers, and pretty soon became known as like a problem child in my school among all the teachers, the principals. So I kept getting expelled from school, kept getting sent to suspension. And it's like the snowball effect just kind of took over. One thing led to another, and I just found myself in deeper and deeper trouble, just started hanging around the wrong crowd at alternative school and ended up getting a charge with three of the other kids that I met at alternative school, which is a school where they send children who've been deemed a problem in public school. But what do you think it was that triggered that wild behavior? You said you felt left out and apart from other people. Why? So the very first day that I actually started school,

one of the kids had pointed out to me that I looked different from my parents. Our parents took us into the classroom to meet the teachers since it was the first day of kindergarten. And, you know, I had never realized that I was different from my parents, had never thought about the color of my skin as being different from theirs, how they were darker skin than I was, never really had a question, and so whenever I had asked my mother, you know, why I didn't look like her and Poppy, you know, she explained to me that I was adopted, and that just blew my mind. Not only was I adopted, but that I was mixed.

I was both black and white. That just really couldn't fit in my mind or my classmates' mind at that time. It was always an issue, and I started to see myself through a lens of being different from everyone. I felt like I didn't fit into my family, even though they made me feel like I belonged. I felt like I didn't fit in with my friends. I felt like I didn't fit in at my church. Everywhere I kind of just felt like I didn't fit, I didn't belong. Now, as you started to get involved with what you described as the wrong people. You became involved with a man you refer to as Cutthroat, who I guess essentially became your pimp. Why did he have such a hold on you?

So in being with the wrong crowd, I had started living on the streets of Nashville as a runaway and started meeting older women who ingrained in my mind that, you know, my body could be used as a commodity and my time with men could actually be profitable. And I had never, I had never been taught that by my mother, never been told, you know, that that is how relationships work. But here I was on the streets and that's what is being put into my brain. And so by the time that I met Cutthroat, I actually thought he was my boyfriend. I thought that this was a normal relationship. I thought that my going out with random men and bringing money back was simply my way of bringing something to the table.

And I didn't come to view myself as a victim of trafficking until my late 20s. What do you recall of what happened the day you shot Johnny Allen? I can recall that day I was in the hotel with Cut, and he had just told me that since it had been so long since I had brought money back, that it was time for me to go out because the room was almost up. It was almost time for us to buy another hotel room. And, you know, he had choked me that night until I passed out. And, you know, whenever I came to, I got up and I went out,

and the man that I shot, he had picked me up. And whenever we went back to his house, he was acting really strange. He kept mentioning how he was a sharpshooter. He had showed off guns to me and it really just made me feel like he was trying to intimidate me. And I mean, it worked and I just wanted to leave. And so I started to feel like really trapped. I started to feel like I couldn't leave. And I really didn't know what to expect from him. I had come to a place in my life after being constantly assaulted by cut where I just expected violence from men. I just expected that that that was what was going to happen because that had always been my experience. And at the man's house, there was a moment where I thought that he was reaching for a gun. I didn't know what was going to happen. I just remember feeling this fear and this sense of immediacy and I reacted and I shot him. Now, you've never denied killing Johnny Allen. The prosecution when it came to

court said you were actually trying to rob him. Why did you take money and guns from the scene? So whenever I met him I had to go out to get money for cut. And I couldn't come back to the hotel empty-handed. If I went back empty-handed, like, I mean, it just wouldn't be good news. That wasn't even an option. It wasn't on the table. And to be honest with you, after experiencing everything there that night with that man, I didn't want to go out with another man. I didn't want to take another risk.

I just wanted to go back to the room. And when I left, that's when I took the guns and, you know, I took his truck so I could get back to the hotel room just so that I would have something to take back to cut. Now, you have described yourself, that 16-year-old girl who did what you've just described. You've described yourself as Satan's seed. Why? At the time, that's how I was made to feel. I was involved in a court proceeding where the whole nature of it was extremely adversarial. And every single thing that was presented was always presented in the worst possible light. It was told to me that I was this incorrigible young girl, that I was a horrible human being. I was just made to feel that I was all these things. And that weighs on you. If you're sitting in a

courtroom and you're constantly told this day in and day out, and you can say nothing and you just see all of these people just looking at you and you're thinking, are they believing this? Like, I can't tell them that it's not true. I want to scream that it's not true, but I can't do that. And so are they, are they accepting this as true? Is this true? I mean, what is wrong with me? I'd never been able to figure out why I just couldn't get it right. Why I couldn't make the right choices. Why I couldn't just go to school and not get in trouble like the other kids. Why I always felt like there was something wrong with me, like I stuck out. And so I really internalized everything that was being said about me, really everything

that was said in the courtroom and then over the course of all the years before. And that's just how it made me feel. What was your response when you were told you would have to serve a life sentence? You know, it was devastating. But at the same time, I had spent so much time worried about the worst possible thing that could happen. And when the worst did happen, strangely, I felt like relieved because I didn't have to worry what was going to happen. There wasn't the not knowing. There wasn't that uncertainty. All that was left was, okay, well, where do we go from here? And so I just vowed from that moment, like, I'm going to fight this.

I don't believe that I'm going to serve life in prison. I don't accept that I'm going to serve life in prison. So let's just figure out how we're going to go about this. So how did you go about it I mean what effect did spending 15 years in prison have on your efforts to obviously want to turn your life around I mean it was hard you know prisons here they are not at all encouraging of anyone who wants to rehabilitate themselves you You literally have to fight for it. And I had to realize that there was a need for me to change. I had to realize that,

you know, things weren't just happening around me and me reacting to it. Like I could actually make conscious decisions to choose how I react to situations, to choose to control myself and not just be controlled by everything that was happening. And I started enrolling in classes. I started doing everything that I could. I enrolled in a college course through Lipscomb University. And, you know, slowly but surely, I started to build back up my self-esteem. I started to tear down all those lies that I had taken on that I was this horrible person and that I would never amount to anything. And, you know, I started to have hope again. And in that meantime, we were also going through the appellate process,

asking the courts to overturn my conviction. And at what point did you realize that you might have a chance because you'd effectively been a victim of child trafficking? So I had always felt that I had a chance, you know, not only for that, but by the sheer fact that I was a juvenile whenever I was charged. And the sentence that I was given was an adult sentence. It was a lifetime in prison, and it just didn't seem right. And so I'd always felt that there was a chance that, you know, I would get some relief, that I would be granted some manner of leniency. And whenever all my appeals were denied and clemency was pretty much a slim chance, you know, that's when, you know, I met my husband now and we really started buckling down on believing that God could completely overhaul everything, that he had power over every sentence, over the judge, over the jury, over everything. And slowly but surely, we started to see change. We started to see things turning around.

We started to see how victims groups in Tennessee were supporting me, which is unheard of. It was unprecedented for the two organizations that came out in support of me. They showed up at my hearing. They wrote letters for me. We started seeing people who were judges, people who were district attorneys showing support for me. And it was like, wow, like only God can do this. He's literally changed these people's hearts. I could remember a time when, you know, I felt that the entire world was against me and they thought I was this horrible human being. But here are people all across the globe who are just rising up and speaking out in support of me. And it was just amazing.

You had support from people like Rihanna and Kim Kardashian. What impact did they have? You know, I think that no person's impact was greater than another, to be honest with you, in terms of expressing support. I think that the school teacher there in the U.K. was just as important as any of them. Everyone who sent a tweet, everyone who sent a letter, everyone who spoke out, everyone who just showed their support by having conversations that was just as important as anyone else and when it comes to the governor's decision he's made it very clear that you know as a public servant as a leader he made it his mission to actually look at the facts

to actually look at the petition and make a decision based off that. It's not fair to someone else who doesn't receive that type of attention that he would base his decision on that. So he really bases his decision on my record, on the things that I had done to improve myself, on my rehabilitation, and on his belief that I could be a positive and contributing member of society. Now you were released in early August. You were given clemency. You were not exonerated from what had happened and you're on parole. What conditions do you have to obey now? So as part of my clemency, I have to do community service regularly, which is not a problem. You know, that's just something that it's in my heart to do anyway. I have to maintain employment, which is also necessary. And I have to report to a parole officer.

Whenever I travel, I have to get permission for that, random drug tests, just the normal things that come along with parole. But I make it a point to not complain because I know that there are so many people who are still trapped in prison who would love that opportunity. How much do you think about the family of Johnny Allen? You know, I think of them often. Every decision that I make, I always think about the family of Johnny Allen? You know, I think of them often. Every decision that I make, I always think about the impact that it can have on other people. Whether I can see that impact immediately or not,

you know, what happened with them has forced me to think of that. They had absolutely nothing to do with what went on with me and Mr. Allen. However, they're the ones that are here paying the price. They're the ones that are here still suffering 15 years later. And, you know, that's, that's horrible. I couldn't imagine, you know, you wake up one day and your life is completely turned upside down. And it makes me want to educate people. It makes me want to share what happened with me so that it can prevent other families from going through what they're going through. Now, there will be vulnerable teenage girls out on the streets now, just as you were.

How would you advise them and their families? Yeah, so my adoptive mother, you know, she definitely made every effort that she could, every effort that would be expected of a parent. But, you know, it's really hard when you're up against all of these other influences that really speak to a child's development. You're up against peer groups. You're up against messaging in society. You're up against what you learn in school. And I would just say that not just parents, but teachers, but everyone.

You know, it really takes a village to raise a child. I think everyone needs to educate themselves on that and on teaching healthy relationship patterns, teaching healthy behaviors when it comes to sexual relations. I think that we sexualize young girls way too early in this country in particular. I think that's a problem that all of us as a society, we can address. Kids are exposed to things like that way too early. And I think that too often people are just okay with it. And they kind of just turn their eye to it. I can't tell you how many people

who witnessed me and going through what I was going through and simply labeled me as fast or promiscuous when really I was being taken advantage of by adult men. I was being exploited. And we need to be very careful about the language that we use because labels can be very, very powerful. They can be very damaging. I think we should all be conscious of that. And to young girls out there, you know, I just want you to know that no matter what you're going through, no matter what you've been through, you can make it out of it. You can survive. You can come out on top. It doesn't have to define you for the rest of your life.

There is hope. There's light at the end of the tunnel. I was talking to Cyntoia Brown-Long. Still to come in today's programme, the third in our series about the partners of military men who, as a result of their husband's post-traumatic stress disorder, have developed symptoms themselves. And the final episode of the serial, Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls. Now, I think I may be a little bit strange.

Everybody went wild when they heard this morning we'd be talking about chocolate. And honestly, I am beginning to realise I'm very unusual in not really being crazy about it. Globally, a hundred billion dollars worth of the stuff is consumed every year. And already people have been telling me which bars their mothers and their sisters loved as children and still do. So why is it such a popular substance for so many people and what happens when you add it to surprising ingredients to make a meal? Well Sue Quinn is the author of Coco, an exploration of chocolate with recipes and she will cook the perfect pasta with gorgonzola,

walnuts, rosemary and chocolate. Sue, why that combination of ingredients? I know some people get a bit alarmed about this particular pairing because they don't think about chocolate and pasta in the same bowl. But what I was trying to do in my book, exploring the really fantastic, interesting story of chocolate, is to showcase how versatile chocolate is in the kitchen and although we think of it as a sweet ingredient and we think of it as a single flavor chocolate um it actually has a lot more to offer when you're cooking than that when did

using it in savory dishes begin to be a thing it's's been used in savoury dishes for centuries. I mean, there's evidence that it even goes back to the pre-Aztec civilisations. Traces of theobromine, which is one of the active compounds in chocolate, has been found on old vessels and platters that were used to serve savoury food. But it really came to the fore in the 18th and 19th centuries in Italy and in Spain when chocolate in Europe was very expensive a real novelty ingredient and chefs basically used it to show off so they put it in all sorts of ingredients particularly in Italy they they were a bit obsessed by it because if your household, if you were a chef in a household that could afford chocolate and use it lavishly, they put it into pasta, they put it into polenta dishes,

they even coated liver in it and deep fried it. Some of it not very appealing, but they were on to something that cocoa could be used almost like a spice. Now, you've got the pasta bubbling i do yeah and you're stirring away at a sauce what is in the sauce okay so i'm frying off some butter melted some butter and frying off some garlic and some finely chopped rosemary and that's going to form the basis of a really rich and cheesy sauce um a spin on a classic ital Italian pasta dish using gorgonzola dolce, which is a beautiful blue creamy cheese, some parmesan, some white wine, some cream and some walnuts. And that is

going to go into the pasta sauce and then I'm going to grate dark chocolate over the top. What kind of chocolate is it that you use in a sort of greenery? Yes, this is not the kind of chocolate confectionery you'd sit eating in front of the television. This is 100% chocolate I'm using, so it has no sugar in it whatsoever. And that means that all the complex flavours of the chocolate itself, rather than the sugar and the additives,

can be used to complement the other ingredients in the dish. So there's cheese in this dish. Chocolate has some of the same aroma compounds as cheese so by using those two ingredients together you enhance those those cheesy dairy compounds aroma compounds chocolate also has bitter notes so it can be used to provide contrast as well to the contrast to the creamy sweetness of the cheese and the milky sweetness of the walnuts. So all in all, you end up with more intense flavour and complex flavour as well.

Now, it's interesting. You give lots of examples of how women's relationship with chocolate has long been seen as sinful. Yes, it has been. I mean, women's association with chocolate goes back to the very beginning because chocolate was made by women in the pre-Aztec civilizations.

But it began to take on a less positive note once the Spanish started to colonize the Americas. And a connotation emerged that women were somehow more susceptible to the pleasures of chocolate. They were particularly prone to being addicted to it or craving it more than men. And there were examples of women using chocolate for nefarious purposes as well. So it became associated with witchcraft. During the Spanish Inquisition, there were accounts of women lacing their chocolate with

some rather vile things in some cases as to cast spells on men mainly or to even poison them. The chocolate industry in the 20th and 21st centuries seems to

have played on the idea that it's a very sexy item i was thinking this morning of of the flake advert well precisely yeah i mean that you can trace that idea right back to the to this idea that women um were particularly susceptible to the pleasures of chocolate i mean there's a there's an anecdote um from the 17th from the 17th century in Mexico where a group of Spanish women insisted on taking their chocolate into church of a Sunday morning. And the bishop threatened them with excommunication unless they stopped because it was disrupting proceedings. And the women simply chose their chocolate over hellfire and damnation and stayed away to drink their chocolate. And they were accused of being so addicted to chocolate that they preferred the risk of, you know, excommunication. So

this idea emerged that women were particularly susceptible to it. So chocolate advertisers, once chocolate became mass produced in the 1930s, I guess, chocolate manufacturers really played on that idea. What is it about it? What's in it that makes it so popular all over the world? And people really crave it. Yeah, I think what we've got is the perfect planetary alignment of pleasure in chocolate. So you've got, first of all, you've got some compounds in chocolate, which are known as bliss molecules.

They really do seem to trigger the pleasure centres in our brain. So we literally get physical joy when we eat chocolate. There's also the fact that it melts at body temperature. So as soon as you put a square on your tongue, it starts to dissolve. And scientists have explained to me that this change in texture is something that the brain really, really loves. And then, of course, you've got this sugar-fat combination, which everybody loves. And there's some theories that it's a similar ratio of sugar to fat as breast milk. So the idea is that they were almost hardwired to love chocolate.

Now, you refer in the book to slavery and its connection with chocolate. Why? Well, I mean, I felt I had to cover this in the book because while chocolate clearly brings shelves are made from cacao beans in West Africa, where farmers, most farmers, live well below the poverty line. They barely scratch a living. More than two million children are estimated to be involved in the cacao trade. So our pleasure comes at a great cost to the cocoa farmers in West Africa.

What most surprised you about chocolate in your research? What did you learn that really astonished you? I've got to say that everything. I was ashamed to admit that when I started researching this, I had no idea how much I didn't know about chocolate. And I think it's one of the foods, one of the last foods that we're really beginning to learn about how it's made so many people I meet now don't really don't really understand that chocolate is a fermented food for instance and it's because we never see the

plantations they they only grow in a in a in a very narrow band 20 degrees north and south of the equator so we're so removed so removed from the provenance of chocolate that we don't really understand it. So everything came as a surprise to me. I've got to say, the degree of poverty in West Africa and some of these cocoa-producing countries really did astonish me. And I now think long and hard before I buy a chocolate bar. Now, dark chocolate is said to ward off all kinds of ills.

Yes. Is that fantasy or can it prevent heart attacks and cancer and all kinds of things? It's not all fantasy, no. There are compounds in cacao, the natural bean, which scientists are compounds um in in cacao in the natural bean which scientists are really interested in interested in it and they do think that it has potential um health benefits um the problem is that there's probably not enough of those compounds in a bar of chocolate to do much for you the compounds in themselves are said to improve your blood flow, which

may sorry, I'm just putting the pasta into the sauce here, which may explain why some studies suggest that the compounds in dark chocolate can help relieve blood

pressure and may even reduce the risk of heart attack. But there's conflicting evidence about that, I've got to say. Now, I've got to wait for a while before I taste this because you're just mixing it all in. I am. I must tell you, we had a tweet from Margaret who said, a phone-in on fat one day followed by a chocolate feature the next. Really?

Yeah, really. Sorry about that. What I would say to that is opt for some dark chocolate because there's not so much sugar. Not fattening? Well, it gives us pleasure. It's good for mind, body and soul, chocolate, to taste a small amount of something that you enjoy. I can't wait to taste the pasta. So, Sue, thank you for the moment. Now, this week we've heard from two women married to ex-servicemen who've suffered post-traumatic stress disorder who as a result have suffered themselves it's now known to be common for the partners of veterans to develop

secondary ptsd and for the past two years the charity combat stress has been running workshops across the country to help them today we hear from a woman we've called Elaine. She's 59 and was one of the first to take part in the charity's online treatment programme which finished this summer. She'd been married for 31 years and her husband was in the military for 12 years. She told Tamsin Smith that his PTSD worsened in 2015, almost three decades after he left military service. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015 which was about 28 years after he'd left service and that led to a psychotic episode for him. He had lost other members of his family in tragic circumstances

and there were just the two of us no other family and he was very emotionally dependent on me and was terrified that he was going to lose me having lost a sister of a similar age to me to cancer. His thoughts were once we'd had that diagnosis that was it and he was going to be completely alone. So your diagnosis of breast cancer prompted a crisis in his PTSD. Did you know he had PTSD before, or had it been rumbling along in the background for many decades? Yes, it had. I don't think we'd had a formal diagnosis, but I was always aware for many years that he was showing a lot of the symptoms of PTSD. And I was convinced that he had it, but he wouldn't really go and seek help for it.

I think he was worried that if he had a label, he would struggle to get employment. And what kind of symptoms was he having? Isolation, not going to social events, or saying he'd go to social events and then cancel him at the last minute, and saw risks in everything. We initially socialised a lot. You'd go to concerts and theatre trips and, you know, parties, and they gradually just died off.

That probably wasn't the retirement that you'd imagined for yourself. No, definitely not. No, I hoped we'd be able to travel more, you know, explore the world. And, yeah, everything changed that night, really. So that was the night of your diagnosis which was incredibly shocking for you. I mean you couldn't have anticipated that actually this was the thing that would send him into crisis could you? No definitely not.

It was just unimaginable really. We'd gone to bed and he was acting really strangely and I was asking him if he was okay and he wasn't responding to me and then he he just got out of bed and got dressed in a very bizarre way and said they're coming for me and I said who and he didn't answer me anymore and then he went downstairs and he started to smash the house up. Trying to escape is what he was trying to do. He was terrified of hurting me. He really didn't want to hurt me because he knew that could make me worse.

But he needed to get out of the house because he was convinced that he was going to be killed that night. I phoned 999 straight away, and eventually he was taken off to hospital. And this was the first time he'd had a psychotic episode like this? It was the only one, yeah. Yeah, he's not had another, not one before and not one since, but that was terrifying. And he doesn't remember much about it really. It's erased from his memory, it was so traumatic for him. Was he given a diagnosis of PTSD at this point?

No, that was the really difficult part. The hospital, we waited quite a long while for him to be seen. I think he was taken off to hospital maybe 11 o'clock at night, 10 or 11 o'clock at night and he wasn't seen by a duty psychiatric nurse until about seven o'clock in the morning by which time he had calmed down and the CPN basically having talked to us felt it was just a stress reaction and suggested that we see the doctor on the Monday, it was at the weekend, for some sleeping tablets because he hadn't been sleeping and didn't think he had any mental health issues at all,

which was quite stunning, really. So then, over the next few months, you were having treatment. What was it like living with him? It was really difficult because he was so determined to look after me. And he did. He did an amazing job. He got me to all of my appointments. But I could see his mental health was really suffering and he wasn't sleeping. You know, there was real sleep deprivation.

He was absolutely physically and emotionally exhausted. Actually, then also, I think that was the point that triggered OCD in him because he became really obsessive about cleaning because he didn't want me getting any infections as I was going through my treatment. You know, it was just... It was probably the worst time of our life. It must have been very difficult for you because on one hand he was trying to look after you It was just, it was probably the worst time of her life.

It must have been very difficult for you because on one hand he was trying to look after you, but on the other hand this was making his symptoms worse. I mean, what was that like if you can describe it? I was trying to do my best to get me through my treatment, particularly the chemotherapy, as well as I could without getting too many infections or other illnesses. But I felt like I was also looking after him again emotionally. His night terrors could be really awful for him and he would be very restless some nights to the point where he actually was reliving something that was going on for him and he punched out in his sleep and gave me a black eye.

He just felt absolutely awful about that to the point where his sleep became even more poor and affected. In fact we stopped sleeping together because he wouldn't sleep if we were in the same bed because he was frightened that he would do that again. Did you have anyone you could talk to about what you were going through? No, no I didn't feel able to talk to family or friends. There was nobody locally that I felt I could really open up about how I really felt. Why not? Shame's the wrong word, but I think with mental health there is that stigma is still there that people don't understand and in fact one lifelong friend quite recently asked me if I'd known then what I know now would I still have married him and in a heartbeat I said yes because this isn't him

this is an illness and it's no different to any other illness I don't think she would have asked my husband that. If you knew she was going to get cancer, would you have married her? So I found that a really challenging question from someone that I'd known all my life, really. It's those sort of things that make it really hard to talk to people. So in moments of despair, I would talk to Samaritans and what made it harder was I almost had to hide to make those calls because if I was upset my husband would then feel guilty

and he would then get more upset. And it became a vicious cycle that we couldn't really share our emotions with each other. And that was not the relationship that we had had. You know, we'd always talked. We'd always been open with each other. Where did you go to make the course to the Samaritans? Quite often I'd go into a spare bedroom you know or I'd just hide in the house somewhere perhaps in the utility area. It would always be when he was asleep but it would still be somewhere where I would hope that he wouldn't hear me if he woke up

because invariably I would get very upset very emotional. What would you say the lowest point was when you needed to get some help? You tried going to hospital once, I mean what would you say was the tipping point in seeking help? After that psychotic episode we did go and see the doctor on the Monday who did give him sleeping tablets but also did a referral into the mental health services for him to be assessed. I was very pleased about that because I thought finally he's going to get the help that he's needed all these years. Unfortunately the referral was closed without any intervention. We thought the referral was still open and we kept waiting and asking when was he going to be seen and kept being told there was long waiting

lists and to be patient. We knew nothing of the armed forces covenant at that point which clearly says that veterans should be seen as a priority. So that went on probably for another couple of years. Meanwhile, he was still deteriorating. He then went into crisis again and started to have thoughts. At first he said of harming somebody, and on the third occasion he said that those thoughts were of harming me. And he was, again, absolutely terrified, and that's why he needed to be taken away. And when was this happening? Beginning of 2018 so when the crisis team arrived by this time they had agreed that they would take him to hospital

purely because I had said I don't feel safe and they said he didn't really need it. It was really to give me respite and the maximum he'd be in was for 72 hours. So the 72 hours became four weeks. It wasn't particularly good four weeks for me. He felt that he got help but I didn't feel that the consultant engaged with me at all. Now your husband's still actually undergoing treatment at the moment what do you think the impact of his PTSD has been on you? I think it has had a huge effect I think I probably have PTSD myself and it's very difficult to understand whether that is because of the cancer or whether it's because of his reaction to it or whether it's a combination of both and I'm very confused. So how did you feel when you were offered to participate in an online version of the partners program run by

combat stress it was fantastic i didn't fully understand ptsd we think we do but it's only when you actually get to understand what causes it how the brain works how the brain processes the information what the behaviors are and how they are a normal reaction to an abnormal situation, that the pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together. Could you have gone to a course where you actually met people in real life? I would like to have done that because I think there could have been other side benefits of you know a support network if you like but I still just don't feel that my husband was well enough to be left for any period of time on his own. You've only just recently completed the online course is it too soon to say that it's made a difference? No definitely not

the other ladies that were online. I think there was generally usually about 15 of us. Their feedback suggested the same thing, that we were all ignoring our own wellbeing. But when we started to see the behaviours of our loved ones, we could actually see a lot of that in ourselves. As soon as a veteran is identified and starts treatment, their loved ones should be offered this support as well because helping the veteran and helping the partner is going to make a really difficult situation easier to cope with. Elaine was talking to Tamsin Smith, and there are links on the Woman's Hour website if you need to find support.

Someone called God Loves Women tweeted on the Zintoya Brown Long interview. Listening to Zintoia Brown, she's an amazing woman, particularly hearing her speak about God and that she believes that prayer and God began to shift her court appeal and change things. And then on the chocolate question,

Margaret said, a phone-in on Fat One Day followed by a chocolate feature the next. Really? Dean Conrad said, you have to celebrate a radio show that investigates fat issues on a Thursday, then features chocolate recipes on the Friday. Fearless broadcasting once again from Dame Jenny and the Woman's Hour team. And Dawn tweeted,

Just tempering a tank of Belgium milk chocolate for a workshop this morning, celebrating a 40th with mum and little ones coming to hashtag chocolate. Do join me tomorrow afternoon for Weekend Woman's Hour. That's at four o'clock Saturday. Until then, bye-bye. Hi, I'm Alistair Souk and I want to tell you about The Way I See It, a brand new podcast from BBC Until then, bye-bye. We'll be speaking to comedian Steve Martin, writer Roxane Gay, musician Steve Reich and many, many more. I'll be your guide throughout the series, so join me as I explore one of the greatest collections of modern art in the world. If you'd like to hear more, just search for The Way I See It on BBC Sounds. I'm Sarah Treleaven and for over a, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who's faking pregnancies. I started

like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.