Woman's Hour - Hostage negotiator Nicky Perfect, Sarah Beeny, Chelsea Women Manager Emma Hayes, Mothers with bipolar, Bad lists

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

Nicky Perfect has spent most of her life in highly fraught and dangerous situations, working as a hostage negotiator. Now she’s written about her experience in a new book: Crisis: True Stories of my Life as a Hostage Negotiator. She joins Nuala McGovern to talk about some of the things she learnt along the way.The TV presenter Sarah Beeny has spent much of her life in the unpredictable world of property renovation. Her latest book, The Simple Life - How I found Home, is about the many homes she's lived in. While she was writing it, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Sarah speaks to Nuala about her perspective on language around cancer, and why she loves having a chaotic home.Emma Hayes is the manager of Chelsea Women Football Club. In her time, they have won six Women’s Super League titles, five FA Cups and two League Cups. Emma joins Hayley Hassall to discuss football, motherhood, women's health, and leadership – which is the subject of her new audiobook, Kill the Unicorn.The Pulitzer prize-winning production Next to Normal is currently on stage at the Donmar Warehouse in London. It features a suburban wife and mother living with bipolar and haunted by her past. Actor Caissie Levy, who plays Diana, and birder and environmentalist, Mya-Rose Craig, share their experiences with Nuala. Did you hear our special Bank Holiday programme about lists? They pop up everywhere in life – and can be good, or bad. Nuala discusses some historically bad lists with authors Helen Lewis and Anne Sebba.Presenter: Nuala McGovern Producer: Lottie GartonOpener 00:00 Nicky Perfect 01:23 Sarah Beeny 10:41 Emma Hayes 23:10 Bipolar Mothers 35:49 Bad Lists 44:09

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2. And of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, this is Nuala McGovern and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Hello and welcome to the first weekend Woman's Hour of September already. Well, as always, we've got a packed show for you today featuring the best of the Woman's Hour guests and interviews from the week gone by coming up this afternoon. I think the way that we talk about illness in general is always you figure out what's going on and then you fix it. And so instead, I sort of went through this almost grieving process in my early teens where I had the realisation that, you know, no medication, no drugs were going to

magically make my mum better. This was just the way that her brain was wired. We'll hear from Maya Rose Craig on what it was like growing up with a mother who was diagnosed with bipolar. Plus, the one and only Emma Hayes, manager of Chelsea Women's Football Club, shares her views on leadership and what we can all learn from her experiences. And Sarah Beeney on why she loves having lots of people over. Really deep down inside, I'm probably a terrible control freak. Like, it'd leave me alone on my own and people would come in the door and I'd say, don't you put your shoes there, you put them three centimetres to the left where they belong, the blue shoes.

So I think I've been saved by having chaotic children and family. All that and lots more for your Saturday afternoon. But first, we start the programme with a remarkable woman. Nicky Perfect has spent most of her life in highly fraught and dangerous situations. She worked with the elite New Scotland Yard crisis negotiation unit and she's brought people safely down from rooftop standoffs, negotiated in gang kidnappings and also terrorist incidents. And she's experienced devastating moments also when things don't go according to plan. Now she's written about her experiences in her book Crisis, true stories of my life as a hostage negotiator. I spoke to her about some of the situations that she's found herself in and also what it takes to be a negotiator.

I should add that parts of this interview refer to suicide and terrorist executions. Nikki started by telling me about what her initial training entailed. All of the scenarios are based on true life scenarios and you're dealing with people in crisis in a variety of different ways. And as a police officer, you generally tell people what to do. And as a person, we generally problem people what to do. And as a person we generally problem solve. We like to problem solve. So even if our friend comes up to us

and they've had a terrible relationship split up, we like to problem solve that, don't we? And we like to say things like, oh, there's plenty more fish in the sea or... It'll be fine. It'll be fine or... They don't deserve you. Exactly, all of those words.

And sometimes actually all the other person wants is just to be acknowledged about how they're feeling. So rather than problem solving, we could just use reflective language and help them and say, gosh, I can only imagine what you're going through at the moment. This must be incredibly challenging for you, or words to that effect. And then that just allows us to build relationships with people

on an emotional level. Let me get into some of the specifics of the book. It opens on Christmas Day when you're called to the home of a man in his late 20s. His family had left him the day before. He was drunk. He was threatening to take his own life. What you said you saw was desperation, not aggression. How can you tell that difference? And I think a lot of people will have come up against in some situation, something that is maybe been perceived as aggression, but could be desperation. Yeah. So experience, I would say. I've also learned, though, that what I'm seeing is not necessarily what is what is true. So my perception at that time was he was desperate rather than aggressive. It turned out that that was correct. But there's also part of your brain that still goes, this is what you're thinking. Just be aware, though, that might change in a matter of seconds.

In an instance like that, I mean, what language do you use? So what I do is I try and find out more about them, because we all have a story. And on that Christmas Day, he had a terribly sad story. You know, his wife had gone and taken the children and he was left on Christmas day, which is supposed to be a family day, surrounded by loved ones, and he was on his own. And in the book, I compare that to the day that I was having with my own family.

So it's about looking at the world from his perspective rather than my own perspective and seeing how I can help him and see what's really going on for him. Is it, this is woman's hour, is it any different being a female negotiator? It's interesting because I was having this conversation yesterday about do women make better negotiators than men or do men make better negotiators than women? And I think that it's all about the individual and the person because some some men are great negotiators

and some are not so great and some women are great negotiators and some are not so great so it really is about the individual person but does it take because you're talking about all this training which I'm fascinated with I want to go on that course um but did you were you always a good negotiator in the sense of even within the police department, were there just certain people who were going to be plucked out to do it? Or do you think these are skills that could be learned by anyone? I think that some people have a more natural tendency to listen and be empathetic. And but you can definitely teach people. So interesting. Your first real life crisis was being called to a hostage taking where a father had taken hostage his baby daughter and was using her as a shield. In the end, the man was tasered by the can't wait to use it. And I'd had my, I'd had like an epiphany moment on my negotiation course. And I was like, well, this is amazing. These skills are incredible. They can make a real difference.

Like a superpower. and he'd been tasered. In my head, before I'd gone to the negotiation, this is literally what was running through my head. I was like, heroin negotiator arrives on scene, talks to the man, he listens to her, she listens to him, hands her the child, shakes her by the hand, and everything's fine. But of course, in reality... It's messy. It's messy. He didn't speak to me for eight hours.

He said two things to me. One was, you don't understand, and the first one I can't repeat on radio. Okay. Yeah. But that really helped me. And the first one, I can't repeat on radio. Yeah. But that really helped me become a better negotiator, I think, and to learn. Because I suddenly realized, actually, I was viewing that whole conversation and that whole negotiation from my perspective. And all that internal dialogue which you've just expressed.

It was all about me. So you kind of had to clear it all away. And, you know, what do you do when it doesn't work out yeah it's hard but is there a particular way to process is do you go with your colleagues you know how do you do that so in the world of negotiation there is a lot of team support people are really really good um The leaders of negotiation are very aware around the impact that it has on your life. And there is support through occupational health, support through talking to colleagues, because they have a good understanding of it. But honestly, I'm probably like most police officers, and probably most people that work

in emergency services, you see and hear things that other people don't see and hear. It becomes your normal. You have crisis after crisis build up and trauma after trauma build up. And you kind of find your own individual way of boxing that. Because I'm thinking you have these personal stories very much of these people that I feel like I'm seeing now the way you've described them. But then you also have like these larger crisis negotiations, for example, Islamic State group.

If we move to that, you were asked to study the actions of one of the notorious terrorists within that group known as Jihadi John. I think my listeners will remember by watching one

of the beheading videos because you needed to understand his process. What can you learn from something like that? I mean, is it then to try and stop something like that in the future? I mean, it's an awful thing to have to put yourself through. So, yeah, and that was my choice, rightly or wrongly. I can't answer whether that was the right or the wrong thing to do, but it was my choice because I was the director of UK hostage and crisis negotiation training at that time and there was a real fear that we were going to have an incident in the uk something possibly similar or we might end up in a negotiation with

somebody who was very radicalized and we were looking at ways of okay so how do how do people become radicalized what is their thought process and what is their belief process so by getting as much information as possible as a teacher to be able to then teach the students unless you've been in that situation and every situation is different anyway so that's one of the that's the reason i was just trying to find out more and as a unit we were trying to find out more yeah and i mean i think with those ones because they stop us in our tracks, because there doesn't seem to be any human aspect to it. Yeah, I think you're right, because there's the lack of empathy, the lack of any care towards another human being, which I think for the majority of human beings is a really difficult thing to process and to fully appreciate. So are there certain people, I'm thinking of Jihadi John, for example, or others like that, that are just impossible to negotiate with?

So in the world of negotiation, you always find a way and do what you have to do. And if that means standing and talking to somebody, a psychopath, then you'll do it. But negotiation is just one tactic, obviously, in policing. So there are many other tactics going on behind the scenes. Right. So if that one doesn't work, then there's another tool in the toolbox, so to speak. We all have a story from negotiation. I learned three really powerful things. One is that we all have a story. Number two is that we all have a crisis in our life. And that number three is loneliness is one of the biggest killers in the UK, probably the world, and not necessarily being on your own, but being lonely, even if you're surrounded by people.

And, you know, now I've put my book out and my story is out there. Some people that know me through my businesses are reading it and going, goodness me, I had no idea. And I'm like, I know I've had an, it's been such a privilege to have had those experiences. It really has. Nicky Perfect, hostage negotiator. Her book Crisis, True Stories of My Life as a Hostage Negotiator is out now. And if you've been affected by anything you've heard in this interview, do search for BBC Action Line at that website where there are lots of resources. The TV presenter Sarah Beeney has spent much of her life

in the unpredictable world of property renovation. You might know Sarah from her programmes like Help! My House is Falling Down, Restoration Nightmare and Sarah Beeney's New Life in the Country. Well, her latest book, The Simple Life, How I Found Home, is about the many homes she has lived in and also about her latest move to a former dairy farm in Somerset and while Sarah was writing it she was also diagnosed with breast cancer. Sarah joined me in the Woman's Hour studio and started by talking about why she's so consumed

with the idea of home. I think I'm obsessed by it because I genuinely think that we all need home. And then I'm kind of obsessed with what home is, as in, is it about the walls or is it about the people inside? And I guess I think over my life, I felt, I feel quite deeply the sense of home and homesickness. I felt quite strongly, actually and many times in my life um and and I think when you feel homesickness I'm kind of like well what is homesickness and what does it mean and what what is it that draws us all together fundamentally we all have one thing in common really I think and that's we need food and water and shelter and people we don't need people around who love us,

but it's quite nice if you do have them. I just have to let listeners know, in case they're not aware, you love having people around. Yours, as I read about it, is not shy about being surrounded by many families, you know, dozens of children, add in a few dogs, cats and chickens. What is it about that atmosphere that you describe so well in the book that you gravitate towards?

Why is that, do you think? I don't know. To me, it feels more like home. But I also, I wonder sometimes whether it's because really deep down inside, I'm probably a terrible control freak. And the antidote to that, like it'd leave me alone on my own. And people would come in the door and I'd say, don't you put your shoes there.

You put them three centimetres to the left where they belong, the blue shoes. And the red one goes over there. But I would be a terrible control freak. So I think I've been saved by other people. I've been saved by having chaotic children and family. And I also think there's something, I don't know quite which comes first, but I think I found big chaotic families very welcoming. And I don't know if you've ever noticed this,

but if you go to a house where they've got sort of four or five children, another four or five children isn't a big deal. If you go to a house where they've got one child, I've got four children. So we don't get invited to people's houses who have one child because it's chaos. Whereas we're often invited to people who have four, five, six children.

They're like, oh, another six makes no difference. Yeah, come on in. Yeah, we just stick some more tomatoes in the bolognese and make it go further it's fine so I quite like that and you remind me of my mother has said like after the third having children it's all the same they say yeah they say after three it's like running a zoo and no better woman to do it I think after reading your book as well but I do want to tell our listeners in case they're not aware that your mother died of breast cancer when you were 10 and she was just

39. Because I feel, I felt this was a thread running through your book, Sarah, for me. And you wrote really beautifully that she died peacefully in her parents' bed shortly after you had been reading to her. And then just after you turned 50, you had a diagnosis of breast cancer yourself. I think in some ways you felt you were kind of waiting for 40 years nearly for that diagnosis, from what I understood. And then it happened. But I did read that you were seeing it as a blip with every intention of rubbing it out. Do you think that's possible? Yeah, yeah, I do actually.

Only because I'm really, really fortunate with the diagnosis that I had. And I live in the UK now and there's the NHS and all the amazing things. Yeah, I think it has, it overshadowed my life before more than it does now, weirdly, because the fear, I suppose, I mean, I made a documentary during my treatment, but largely because I realised slowly that the fear of breast cancer is largely based on something that happened. You know, it's my second son said, I said, oh, were you terrified when I was diagnosed? And he said, well, I was really terrified, but then I thought about it and I thought the word cancer, I only associate with your mum who died and another dear friend of ours who also died. And he said, and then when I was thinking about it,

almost everyone you know has had cancer. And I went, yeah. And he said, now they're better. We never talk about it. And I thought that's the truth of it, it is terribly tragic in some situations but um but well the earlier the diagnosis the better the outcome and and the outcomes not always and that's terribly terribly terribly sad but compared to 40 years ago the outcomes are considerably better than they were. I did watch your documentary that you made for Channel 4, a feeling that maybe I got to know

you a little bit through that as well as reading your book but I was struck by the fact that you were prepared to go through that treatment which is is at times gruelling, although worth it, of course. But why you decided to do that and also, and this goes for other programmes perhaps as well, but bring your family along with that as well and put them in the public eye at such a difficult time. I felt it was really important, actually. Well, first of all, I did think twice about doing the documentary at all,

but I made it with only two two really good friends so Angie and Johnny and I the three of us made it together so I wouldn't have done it if it was with people I'd never met before um but I wanted well three reasons one is I wanted people to not be scared because I met people along the way who who found who worried that they found lamps but they were too scared to go to the doctor so they didn't go and I I thought gosh if there's one person who goes to the doctor because they found a lump then that's worth it but I wanted them I did ask I mean I did ask them I did say do you want to do it or not but I feel really strongly

that breast cancer is seen as something that happens to 50-year-old women largely, but doesn't. Because if you're lucky enough to have anyone who loves you, they go through it too. And I really wanted to make that really clear that this is, you know, you're not on your own. Everyone else goes through it too. And everybody has to go through it. And they had a choice, you know, not to do it or to do it. But I think the message that this is something that you go through together with all the people who love you, if you're fortunate enough to have them. I think I just think it's an unspoken thing that people don't talk about.

And I wanted to blow it out of the water. And the fact that you mustn't be scared because diagnosis is and treatment is better than it was. And blow it out of the water. You did, Sarah, as you do with many things, which I'll get to in a moment. But just before I move on from breast cancer, you prefer not to talk about being all clear from cancer because language can be important. You would rather say that you've reached the end of treatment. Do you want to explain that a little um yeah i mean to be honest it first happened when i went on a show and they they said oh gosh you've got the all clear and i was like oh well that doesn't sound because you don't really they just kind of go right your treatment's finished and and off you go come back if you if you think you have cancer and you're like oh i'm not a doctor I don't know anyway um so it is a little bit actually anyone who's had breast cancer I think when I said that they all went that's so true that's so true so anyone in

my boat understands exactly what it means but you know well ultimately we're all going to die of something and nobody knows we're clear of anything it's's just, so to say you're clear of something, I can't, that's just not true. It's just that, you know, you don't, no one's all clear. You know, anyone is not clear. There isn't anybody out there who's all clear, definitely. So it didn't, I don't know. It probably sounds the same for everyone else,

but it didn't sound the same to me. I understand. No, no no i think these conversations about the language that we use on on uh parts of our lives like this is important so that that's what i wanted to hear from you on that and i also want to hear from you on this that's from your book the one really stupid thing that i knew i did was buying Rise Hall and I knew it at the time. 40,000 square feet, 97 rooms and 32 bedrooms. What possessed you, Sarah? I was dead into it, actually. We were dead into it. That's probably the truth. We were quite, so Graham and I met when we were really

young. We were 18 and 19 and we had a property development company and a property investment company when we were within about within about four months of meeting. I was quite a grown up child. And looking back on it, probably not so grown up as I thought I was. But anyway, so we were in our late 20s and we'd spent our 20s buying property and sites and things. And you used to get these auction catalogs in those days, which is sort of early Internet. But you'd get them posted and they were like glossy brochures of what's coming up in an auction. And then one day there was this enormous stately home and its guide was like practically nothing.

And we were like, should we just go on? We call them jollies. So we would go and look at this property. We went and looked at this property. So it was my brother who was in business with us and Graham and I, and we went and looked around this property. And I mean, if you're going to look around something the size of the House, in the size of the House, the Parliament, in a field that you could technically afford to buy, I mean, you've got to be very unromantic to not think, oh. I mean, admittedly, a lot of it was missing, that building.

But anyway, it sort of set off a chain reaction and we ended up buying Rice Hall. I do want to move to a couple of aspects. You do have four boys, Billy, Charlie, Raffy and Laurie that of course feature heavily as well. But I was interested to read that you always wanted to be a boy, which is one aspect I'm interested in. And also you've some pretty strong views on raising boys. You wrote that someone once told you that girls trash your head and boys trash your house. Do you still stand by that? A little bit, yes.

I mean, it's a grotesque generalisation, isn't it? Because everything is a generalisation and you have to accept that everyone doesn't fit into it. But as a bit of a rule, I mean, honestly, I bet if I had four daughters, I'd say I only wanted daughters. They're perfect. I mean, how, I bet if I had four daughters, I'd say I only wanted daughters. They're perfect. I mean, how awful to have a son.

But I happen to have sons, so I'm a bit biased. Are you, Sarah Beeney, as my final question, finally slowing down? No, of course not. No, definitely not. But I kind of think I might. I mean, I do grow lettuces. Sarah Beeney there and her book, The Simple Life, How I Found Home, is out now. And we had lots of you getting in touch, saying how much the interview resonated with you.

Here are just a couple of the messages. An email from Barbara. A refreshing view of life. I like the idea of overcoming being pedantic by welcoming chaos. I haven't quite managed that. Ashley also got in touch. Brilliant to hear Sarah is in a good place in treatment of her illness. It's a good thing to remember the word cancer is not a sentence. Still to come on the programme. What's it like to have a mother who has bipolar? Well, that is the subject of a new musical.

We'll hear from a cast member and also chat to someone who grew up while her mother was being diagnosed. Plus, in case you missed it, we did a special programme on Bank Holiday Monday about something that is part

of all of our lives. I'm talking about lists. Well, you'll hear about the darker side of lists in just a little while. And remember, you can enjoy Woman's Hour any hour of the day. If you can't join us live at 10am during the week, just head to BBC Sounds and search for

Woman's Hour. Now, there aren't many people who know more about leading women than Emma Hayes. She's been manager of Chelsea Women's Football Club for more than a decade, during which they've won six Women's Super League titles, five FA Cups and two League Cups. Emma herself has won the WSL Manager of the Season six times and Best FIFA Football Coach in 2021. What a CV. But it hasn't been an altogether easy ride. Emma says she's been on a mission

ever since her dad encouraged her to change the face of women's football in the 1990s. And now to inspire the rest of us to follow in her footsteps, she's released a new audio book. It's called Kill the Unicorn, and it aims to demystify the role of leader and also give us some important life lessons. Well, Emma joined Hayley in the studio this week, and she started by explaining how she sees her leadership style. I often talk about being almost like a CEO or a head contractor of an organisation or I'm laying down the foundations to build a house but it needs everybody to be able to build it and fill it. So I have to manage across so many different people and of course to be able to deliver what

I want to deliver I might not be the best person to get the best out of everyone and I have to recognize who can and who can't and go from there because you are so successful so it's interesting that you're saying but I'm not necessarily the best at everything so is it is your role perhaps at bringing the best out of others rather than surpassing all it's a bit of facilitator. I think of my role as a facilitator. So there might be players, certain players who require certain things. And I might have an assistant who's better equipped to deal with that. Whereas I might be better off

dealing with certain other players over certain areas. That's why for me, it's so critical you get to know who your people are. Because I keep getting asked this question all the time. What is leadership? What does it look like? And the more I getting asked this question all the time, what is leadership? What does it look like? And the more I get asked that question, the less I know.

I feel like what it is, is understanding that in order to get the best out of a team, it requires many different people and many different facets to make that happen, not just one head coach, for example, or a ceo or one manager but how do you do that because as you say you've got a lot of players and other people to to organize and coach and see through life and is it about building trust between you and those people because you actually say that the truth-telling moment is when you ask a player how can i help you because that actually opens up some difficult conversations that many people sometimes don't want to know. You know, lots of managers will say your personal life is your personal life.

I don't need to know who you are. You just need to do the job. But it seems that that's not your style at all. No, and I don't want to pry into their lives if they want to keep it to themselves. But especially when they're troubled, I think emotional intelligence is highly required. And if I notice something from body language to things that they're not quite doing at the level I expect them to or that they're used to doing, I'll always challenge it. I'll ask what's going on. And as I said before, if it's not me, I will certainly get somebody else in the team to do that because once you get underneath what's causing people trouble or getting in the way of them being at their best it certainly I think makes people feel more free and more lifted to be able to perform to their very best level. But what has the response been to that

you know you're opening up those questions are people reluctant or have you have you come across some instances where you've gone real deep? Yeah, no, absolutely. I can think of conversations throughout my whole career, whether it's dealing with players whose parents are alcoholics or they've had suicidal thoughts or there's mental health issues or extreme menstrual cycle problems or big relationship breakups. I think most of the people I coach are in relatively young in their early 20s so I have to be able to to help them navigate that as well as trying to get them

to perform on the pitch yeah what came across from listening to your book and I've listened to the whole thing by the way is that you are a bit more of a counsellor than than perhaps a leader at the top who doesn't know anybody yeah no no question I have to navigate from, I mean, and this isn't just about the players. I might have interactions between staff that aren't going particularly well. And what we manage is, well, we call them great conversations, not appraisals. I mean, it's so formal and ridiculous in my eyes. But being able to understand what makes, what's important to people, what makes them tick and then having enough

regular check-ins if it's not me it'll be somebody else in my team to to try and i always say you have to you have to put little fires out before they become big ones and if you stay on top of the little fires uh you can keep a team navigating if you ignore them they'll blow up in a really big way yeah it sounds like a lot of hard work but you're obviously doing very well at it. I can't go on without asking you your reaction to the news this week and your opinion following Luis Rubiales, the head of Spanish football, and the kiss he planted on Jenny Hermoso during the World Cup celebrations. What are your thoughts on that and how it was handled? I think my thoughts are firstly with the players

and with the whole of girls girls and women's all of them, that this is a huge wake-up moment for Spanish society. This goes beyond Spanish football about how women feel they're treated or mistreated. And I hope that it will bring seismic systemic change. And you can see with the reaction across Spain that women across the country are certainly in support of Jenny Hermoso and the entire Spanish team. And you obviously work in that very male dominated environment. I know you said in your audio book, it's quite funny. You can't just ring Sir Alex Ferguson and ask him how he deals with players periods.

You've got different challenges. So what is it like for you in that environment periods you've got different challenges so so what is it like for you in that environment and what are the different challenges you face well we first of all we're not men let's start with that and with that comes a whole different set of challenges i'm sure if i coached in men's football i'd be asking exactly the same question but that has to be the starting point from everything to how we eat to how we rest to how we train to how we recover all of those considerations need to be thought about how we supplement you know we put the right things something as basic as making sure we get omega

3 into our body because we can't ingest enough through our diet but it's significant for women to ignore those things plus the realities around women who perhaps aren't having regular periods and the challenges that might come with that. And then creating a support network, which quite simply doesn't exist. That's for me the big thing. We have to drive industry change to say, look, if we want women to be at their very best in sport, we need more movement coaches that understand women. We need more pelvic floor specialists. We need more sports science around women's bodies. We need more research around women's sports.

Like we have to drive an industry change. And with that, I mean, I'm challenging academically you know we need more higher education courses in and around training people in particular areas around women's health women's bodies and in particular to women's sports and that area is massive there's so much to attack and you're right it's been hidden for so long I mean I think in in every area of industry and business talking to your boss about periods is excruciatingly painfully awkward and but the fact that you've opened that up is going to allow to so much more research and development in that area expertise for me is the big thing we need better more educated experts around women's body in the game and for me that starts with higher education we need more courses that are developing more experts and one of the

things i was going to get on to actually was the rate of women dropping out of sport especially when it comes to motherhood or changes in the physique and we've just had an email in actually someone listening to the program who says I'm really pleased to hear extreme menstrual cycle issues mentioned in your interviewee as one of the things she has dealt with as a woman's football team manager. It led me to leaving sport which I had represented the country at consistently for years because it was impossible to manage whilst also being committed as a team so obviously you want to change that but how many women are are dropping out because of issues with

either their health or will go on to motherhood as well you hear lots of people saying um I I wanted to become mother but I had to leave the game in in order to do that what what challenges are you facing across the board i think body confidence body image at young ages we absolutely need to be challenging the department of health and education around sending the right experts into school to educate girls around their bodies and body image and body confidence and body menstrual cycle and i think importantly when it comes to motherhood challenging hr teams across the country in every every employment to to be able to put hr policies in that best support women who are going through either planned motherhood or unplanned motherhood or in and of course during menopause for me from

puberty to menopause we have a significant amount of work to do not just in sport but in society and obviously it's something you've been through as well becoming a mother has been a massive one of your biggest achievements you say and but it's also shifted your focus it's made you see people rather than players and tell us about your your how you work now as a mother and and obviously you went back to work quite quickly how difficult was that for you yeah I don't know how I did it to be honest with you I don't know what I was thinking back then I was in a fog the entire time but I felt like I couldn't leave the job for nine months because if I did how was I going to leave and go on maternity leave and

return to a football job where simply no woman had ever done that before and not and not you know sacrifice myself and i.e the opportunity to continue to coach but we're women we do it we manage did is there a cost to that yes I think I think there was to my, not just my emotional health, but obviously the endometriosis, which got worse increasingly over the four years after giving birth. And those pressures were not imposed on me by the club. It was me, myself, feeling like I had to do it. And I have regrets with that. I wish I had taken a little bit more time to recover.

But here we are and what it's well that pressure is also something that many women face you know it's one of the realities that we still have to try and hurdle have you ever been made to feel that you should be grateful yes for where you are absolutely I get it all the time in what um just as I said to you just being reminded of of my place and that the women's game is a high level and um I work with world class athletes and it's not a you know I don't mean to you know talk negatively about any male team male club but the realities are I already coach elite players and I think it's important to see that in its own right instead of it being a stepping stone to something yeah and and one of your phrases that you have in the book, which I love, is,

if it ain't broke, smash it. Yeah. And obviously that's what you're trying to do already. But what would you want your legacy to be? What more do you want to do? What's next for you? Truthfully, my people, when I listen to Karen Carney or any of Luco on TV

and I think about the work those young women are doing, and whether it's Carly Telford going into the commercial team at Chelsea, what I want to watch is scores of, whether they're former players or people in the game, coming through and building upon it. That, for me, is the biggest legacy, is that you leave something behind, and that's always the people.

Emma Hayes' new audiobook, Kill the Unicorn, is available now. Do you know someone who has bipolar? The chances are you may well do. There are more than a million people with bipolar in the UK and millions more are impacted through close friends and

also family. Next to Normal is a Pulitzer Prize winning musical currently on stage at the Donmar Warehouse in London, and it focuses on Diana, a suburban mother who is struggling with bipolar. The effects of Diana's illness on her husband and also her children are profound, and the treatment that's been prescribed

has even more devastating consequences. Casey Levy plays Diana, and she joined me alongside Maya Rose Craig, who describes herself as an environmental and diversity campaigner. Her recent memoir, Bird Girl, chronicles her own mother's struggle with bipolar. I began by asking Casey how she prepared for the role of Diana. Well, I did a lot of research. I did a lot of reading, a lot of speaking with people who have firsthand knowledge of bipolar. I myself have a very regular amount of depression and anxiety, and I'm happy to talk about that.

I myself am a mother of two young children, so I bring a lot of who I am to the role. And I feel as though we did a really intensive job as a cast and crew of doing research, having experts come into the room while we were rehearsing just to make sure that we were doing things properly. And we even actually went back through the script and updated some of the timelines of the visits to her psychopharmacologist, her treatments, just with the newer information that we have, you know, 15 years later. So it's very well researched as a company as well. You also have Eleanor Worthington Cox performing as your neglected, tortured daughter, Natalie, that many are also speaking about her. There is a part where,

after witnessing this romantic moment between the daughter, Natalie, and Natalie's boyfriend, Henry, Diana, your character, is mourning the loss of her old life, longing for the days that she lived in both pain and joy, as opposed to the numbness that this new medication has caused. Deeply personal and complex issues. I think the audiences are finding that it's just this incredibly human story, because although it centers around complicated grief and mental

illness, I think it touches on a lot of things we all experience in our day-to-day lives, whether you yourself are affected or you have a family member. And with that family member, I mentioned Natalie there. The impact her mother's diagnosis had on her, how would you describe it? Oh, I mean, I think it's defining for her life. I think she herself, Natalie, experiences some of the highs and lows that Diana does. I think it causes a lot of fear and anxiety in her own life. And of course, in their relationship, being very strained is not really having a mother who was able to mother her

in the way she needed. I want to bring in Maya Rose here, because you have written about your relationship with your mother, Maya Rose. You wrote the book Bird Girl. And it was about a passion for birds, but also about your mum struggling. Tell us a little bit more about why you decided to do that. Yeah, it was a really raw decision, actually, because I love birds and nature and I always knew I wanted to write about my relationship with the outdoors um but while I was plotting this book Bird Girl out I realized that half the reason that I feel so strongly about spending time in nature is because that's how my family and family and I coped with my mother's bipolar diagnosis and that's kind of how we held ourselves together um and so I realized that it was this book that was once about nature was suddenly going to get

very very personal and when I was asking my mum about it actually um she felt much more confident about that idea than I did she thought the idea of telling a very very honest story about what it's like to have bipolar about what it's like to have bipolar, about what it's like to have a family member who's struggling with mental illness. She felt that a story like that needed to be put out there. Yes, she's very happy to talk about this publicly. I do want to make that clear to our audience, your mum, Helena. But how aware were you as a child of your mum struggling? It was a really difficult journey in that, um, my mum had been struggling for a long time, long before I was born in fact. And so, um, I was, I was very young when she was

going through quite severe manic and depressive episodes and I didn't really understand. Um, and it all sort of culminated when I was, was um eight or nine and she had tried to take her own life and she had been um hospitalized she'd been sectioned and at this point we still didn't know what was going on we knew clearly that there were mental health issues but none of the doctors seemed to understand and I think because of that my parents also didn't have the language to explain to me what was going on because they didn't either and then I think once we finally did get that bipolar diagnosis I was still only about 10 and so I think the way that we talk about illness in general is always you figure out what's going on and then you fix it and so instead I sort of went

through this almost grieving process in my early teens where I had the realization that you know no medication no drugs were going to magically make my mum better this was just how the way that her brain was wired and we needed to figure out ways to cope with that and it was really difficult until I made my peace with that and you were able to make your peace with that how but for For my family and I, it was spending time in nature. And a big turning point for us was the period after, well, she'd gone through a very, very severe depressive episode. And I felt at the time like I had lost my mum, actually,

because she wasn't getting out of bed. She could barely talk. She didn't seem very interested in what was going on in my life and we went on a holiday a bird watching trip for three weeks which was probably not anything a doctor would advise to do um but we did it anyway and it was fantastic and it was like my mum came back to life um and I was spending time with her and I I think since then, we sort of decided that for us, spending time in nature together was incredibly important. And I think after having gotten that diagnosis, it did make a big difference because we were working towards how to make this better

for her, how to help her suffer less. And I think the really difficult thing with bipolar actually is it takes years and years to get a diagnosis. I think the average is 9.5 years to get a diagnosis. And when you're struggling with mental health issues, it's so difficult when the doctors aren't even sure what is wrong with you in the first place, what's the mother in the musical, really feeling hard done by, really, by having this medication that dulled some of the joy and the pain. And I'm wondering, how is your mum doing now, if it's OK to ask? Yeah, it is. It's funny, actually, when I wrote out the first draft of Bird Girl,

my editor left a slightly sarcastic, but not completely note on the epilogue, sort of going and everything solved and they all live happily ever after and I had to go like well I know that's not how it works like she still has bipolar there are obviously still really difficult moments because the nature of the illness is it never settles but we have managed to find the correct sort of cocktail of medication. And I think even though, you know, it's very easy to sort of go, oh, I miss the highs and the lows. I think when you get to the extremes of either end, it doesn't feel good.

It feels awful, in fact. And so she, in order to sort of keep the family together and keep herself going actually feels very strongly about taking her medication. But it's been, it's taken probably 15 years. Maya Rose Craig there sharing her experience of being the daughter of someone with bipolar. Her book is called Bird Girl. And we also heard from Casey Levy,

who plays Diana in Next to Normal, which is on until October at the Donmar Warehouse in London. Did you catch our Women's Hour Bank Holiday Special Programme? Well, it was about something that has a place in many of our lives, also in the wider world, maybe something you use on a daily basis. I'm talking about lists. And when you start thinking about them, there are literally lists in just about every area of life, in social media, journalism, novels, poems, art, lists that tell you what to do, what not to do. One of the things we spoke about on this programme was lists in the public domain.

So music, books, wealth, power lists, for example. But there is also another darker side of lists. And to talk more about that, I was joined by staff writer for The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, and also the writer Anne Seba, the author of 10 nonfiction books. The most recent of Anne's books is Ethel Rosenberg, An American Tragedy. And I started by asking Anne how Ethel Rosenberg got onto a list that you really don't want to be on. And what was the chain of events that led to her being named not only as a spy, but also ultimately to her execution? It was a time of enormous fear of communism, a sense in America that they and the

Allies had won World War Two, but they were in danger of losing the peace. Why? Because of this fear of communism rearing its ugly head. So that, of course, gave a huge opening to populists and demagogues in a divided America to be strong and to show that America could be strong in the face of communists. So they went after many communists. And that's when you start having lists. So Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, said there were 55,000 communists. And most famously, Joe McCarthy said he had a list of 205 communists who were working in government. And that was really the start of it. And it gathered pace. So they started to look at all the communists whom they knew, card carrying communists. And back to your question, Ethel probably never had a card. They never produced a card. But as the wife of a known communist and they had other information on Julius,

she was brought in to face charges as a lever to make her husband talk and to name names, to name names that were on this list. Now, of course, it's much more complicated. And that's why I really am on your list of people who don't like lists. I'm aware of the dangers of these lists, because it doesn't allow for nuance. It's so polarizing. It's so binary, if you like. So Ethel is deemed a communist, therefore she must be evil. And that's really the danger because they went down that route. They charged her with conspiracy to commit espionage, hoping it would have the

effect of making Julius talk and it didn't. And in the end, the US Deputy Attorney General had to say she called our bluff. So Ethel lost her life. Ethel was electrocuted partly because she, well, mostly because she was loyal to a man who was on the list. But there was no evidence against Ethel herself. Helen, you're listening to Anne there. Do you agree with her about the danger of lists? I think she makes a really good point, though, which is about the fact that, you know, Tony Benn had these questions about power, you know, who's given it to you and who's named you exerciser. And then the most crucial one is, how can we get rid of you? And I think there has to be a version of that for lists too, which is

who makes the list, who controls the list, and how do you get off the list? And Ethel Rosenberg seems to be somebody who had no access to that list. It branded her one thing and there was nothing she could say to exonerate herself. There was simply no way for her to get off that list. And I think that's why so many people feel a kind of creeping sense of unease about lists. Is there a form of control over people that they don't have any say in or access to themselves? You have written Difficult Women, A History of

Feminism in 11 Fights. That's a sort of a list. It is a list. And it is a kind of classic women's magazine list, you know, sort of 37 tips to do X or Y. The reason I did it is it, in the nicest possible way, the book is a kind of ragback. You know, it looks at everything from the suffragettes to the second wave in the 70s. And actually having a list allowed me to bring together some very disparate things. And that's, you know, that is the kind of the upside of lists, the joy of lists, they allow you to make connections, perhaps that you might not have otherwise have made. Now, when those are the wrong connections, that's when it becomes sinister, obviously. Do you think it's also for us to be able to understand a little bit more that a list

somehow is a shortcut to that? I think what Anne said about this idea about the kind of binary nature of lists and the kind of dividing up the world is really important. I was thinking about where the kind of mania from lists come from. And it's hard not to see it as a kind of outcrop of that 19th century craze for classifying everything, you know, from Linnaeus and Darwin and Galton and others, the idea that the world has now become so complicated that you need to find some way to, you know, to make sense of it, to simplify it. And now that has had some incredibly good effects. You know, if one of the things that we know is that IQ, average IQs have risen throughout the 20th century.

And that's because we've become better at abstract thinking. Lots of other things, but that's one of them. And the way that, you know, classifying the world. So there are benefits to the idea of being able to think like that. But I can also see lists as a reaction to complexity. Things are dangerous and complex, as you were saying, with the idea that there is a kind of looming communist threat. And the list then becomes a kind of protective way. If we can only just write down who the bad people are, then we'll be safe. And that's, I think, again, the dark side of lists. You are working on another book about the

Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. Do lists feature in that? Of course they do. Even though you don't like lists? Well, I'm a historian. I have to write about what I find and I don't necessarily like what I find. There's no question that lists deepen fear and paranoia

and in the hands of some kind of populist leader or demagogue, they're very useful. So, of course, I don't like them. And historically, Jews have suffered from lists. Once Jews were told to register and a few brave Jews decided they wouldn't and then they didn't have to wear the yellow star. But it was a process. You go on a list, you wear a yellow star. But it was a process. You go on a list, you wear a yellow star, you're taken to a camp, you're killed, and looters take your flat. So you want to keep off those lists if you can. But most people don't have access to the means

to get off the list. There are a few good lists, one should say, in all of this wartime. Of course, there are things like Schindler's List. That's the one we know about where Jews could be saved. But it's not something you'd particularly want. You'd rather not be on the list in the first place. But it's this reduction to making people one thing. They're Jews. So they go on a list and we have to kill them. I mean, that was Hitler's final solution. So you can't write about the Holocaust without writing about lists. And they're incredibly complicated. I think one of the most heinous crimes really of the Nazis, among many, but you know, haven't got all day,

all week, is really the way he made Jewish leaders collaborate in order to put people on a list. And do you save the children? Do you save the elderly? Who do you save? Do you save your friends or do you save those with influence? There's no possible answer to this, which is why lists are morally so impossible to accept. You were on a bad list. Is that fair to say? Do you want to tell us that experience? Yeah. So I write a lot about feminism, gender, transgender issues.

And that landed me on The Gland, which is an American LGBT organisation, list of kind of, well, I guess they would say transphobes. It's a characterisation I regret. But I was next to Rush Limbaugh because of her alphabetisation. Who is a conservative American radio host. Extraordinarily conservative American radio host, referred to women as feminazis. And I find that very sad because I think that my kind of cautious criticisms of self-idea are miles away from the ravings of kind of some sort of shock jock. But the fact that we are together on a list for some people means that that is a kind of thought terminating cliche. You know, what do you need to know about Helen Lewis?

Oh, she's on the glad list. And that to me has been a, you know, something that's kind of followed me around. And there's no way for me to get off that list. That was my next question. You know, I'm on that list forever. And you know, I'm grouped together with a lot of people I don't feel I have anything politically in common with, I would probably have major, major disagreements with. But that is enough. And the other really sad thing that it's taught me is when you're on the list, people don't look very much further. They assume other people have done the research

and that you wouldn't be on there for no reason. There's no smoke without fire. And I think that probably brings us back to your communists. People assume there's no smoke without fire. If you're on the list, you must have done something. And that's absolutely where I agree with you, because what lists do is simplify people and reduce them to one thing. And anyone who has any interest in the world or history or philosophy

knows that you can be many more than one thing and more than one thing at once. And it's this reduction to simplicity. It's such a blunt tool to put people on the list that I think it behoves any of us who write about them just to be wary of their effect. You mentioned good lists as well in serious circumstances like Schindler's List. There was also the power of Jess Phillips, for example, reading out aloud in the House of Commons a roll call of women that was compiled by Karen Ingalis-Smith for her work with counting dead women, recording the names of women killed where the perpetrator or suspect is a man. And I feel I have seen that, heard that as well in other movements like Black Lives Matter, for example.

How do you see their significance? When you're talking about people being reduced to something, in some ways that is an acceptance. Anne, you'll know this better than me, but I'm pretty sure that Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, keeps rolls of everybody who was killed, and it keeps a list of righteous among the nations, which is Gentiles who helped out Jews during the Second World War war and we have in our town centers first world war memorials

you know we have lists like that because it's the way of keeping those people alive and keeping them in our memory and those i would say are good lists but they are lists that exist because for a very sad reason which is usually of people who one characteristic about them was the only thing that mattered whether it was they were soldier whether they were jewish so they're a reflection of the same process that we're talking before, but an attempt to kind of alleviate it by keeping those people in our memory. Helen Lewis and Anne Seba talking to me about bad lists. And if that has whet your appetite for lists, you can hear the whole programme on BBC Sounds.

It's the Woman's Hour episode from Monday, the 28th of August. That's all from me today, but Woman's Hour will be back on Monday and it is the start of a brand new series. We often talk to women about the immediate impact of traumatic life-changing loss. But what happens after the dust has settled? How do you go about rebuilding your life? Well, next week, we'll be inviting you to listen to three women's experiences of picking up the pieces

following a terrible event. Clare Russell lost her fiancé, Mark, to suicide in 2018 and miscarried their baby just a few weeks later. On Monday, Clare will tell me how she began

to recover and rebuild. That's Monday at 10. Until then, have a great weekend. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. I'm Sarah Trelevan and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was 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.