Woman's Hour - Mental Health Problems and Relationships, British Charcuterie, Unconscious Bias

Episode Date: April 23, 2019

If you have a common mental health problem such as depression or anxiety what effect does it have on your relationship? What should you expect from your other half? Equally, if your partner has depression, what is the best way to support them? Linda Gask has had 30 years of clinical practice experience as a psychiatrist in the NHS. Poorna Bell is a journalist and author. She has written about her late husband’s struggle with depression and suicide. Nicole Krystal Crentsil is the co-founder of Black Girl Festival and a public speaker on culture. Nicole has spoken openly about her own mental health and the importance of a strong relationship. Alan Phillips has experienced severe depression in the past - his wife Karen has been hugely supportive.Henrietta Green, founder of British charcuterie Live, tells Tina why British charcuterie is worth sampling and celebrating.In her new book Biased - The New Science of Race and Inequality, Jennifer Eberhardt, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, draws on years of research looking at how unconscious racial bias is ever present in our lives and tells us what we can do to counter it.Presenter: Tina Daheley Interviewed guest: Poorna Bell Interviewed guest: Nicole Krystal Crentsil Interviewed guest: Alan Phillips Interviewed guest: Karen Phillips Interviewed guest: Linda Gask Interviewed guest: Henrietta Green Interviewed guest: Jennifer Eberhardt Producer: Lucinda Montefiore

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.

Hello, this is Tina Dehealy with Tuesday's edition of the Woman's Hour podcast. Coming up, if you're struggling with your mental health, what impacts can it have on the people around you? We've been discussing how to cope with mental health problems in relationships. British Charcuterie Live is taking place today. We speak to its founder, Henrietta Green, about why charcuterie is worth sampling and celebrating. And Jennifer Eberhardt, the author of Bias, the new science of race and inequality, joins me to talk about how unconscious racial bias affects us all. Now, relationships are hard enough at times, but how do you cope when one of you is suffering

from poor mental health? What is the best way to support your partner if they're suffering and what should you expect from your other half if you are the one struggling? Well, I was joined by Linda Gask, who's had 30 years' experience as a psychiatrist in the NHS, journalist and author Purnabell, who's written about her late husband's struggle with depression and addiction, Nicole Crystal Crensell, co-founder of Black Girl Festival and Alan Phillips and his wife Karen. Now Alan has suffered with severe depression in the past.

I started by asking Linda how common it is for poor mental health to be a factor in relationships. Well I think it works both ways in relationships. They're just so important to us that if a relationship is going well, then that's often very good for our mental health. But if there are things going on outside in our lives that are affecting us and stressing us out, that can be very damaging and troublesome sometimes for our relationship if we can't handle them. And if our relationships become problematic or if one person develops mental health problems within a relationship that can also put a lot of stress on that relationship what can the triggers

be and what have you seen change in the 30 years that you've worked as a psychiatrist well i don't work as a psychiatrist now i i retired from from working in the nh, but I've also had experience of this myself in my own relationship and as a person suffering from depression over a period of time. And I think that the key triggers are often things that can happen to people like losing their job is a pretty major thing very often for men. The breakdown of relationships can trigger even more problems, both for men and for women. And just other stresses in life, like decisions about moving house, the death of people who are important to you within the family, all of these things can trigger off problems with mental health and then problems within a relationship, sometimes secondary to that.

Nicole, how has anxiety impacted you, your life and your relationship? Yeah, for me and my partner, it's a challenge, but it's one that I think we have found a way to work around because I was really honest with my anxiety from the start from the beginning of my relationship and I think for me it was to kind of explain some behavioral changes or mood changes and attitude changes and to make sure that they weren't relayed upon as it's because of you um so it was really important from the get-go to really talk about my anxiety with my partner so

he was able to understand what was going on in my head really. How soon did you have that conversation into your relationship? It was pretty soon it was in the getting to know you stage it was that remove that layer of removal where we were trying to really understand each other and the way that we work this is before we decided to move in together. This was really in the early stages. And I think for most relationships, I guess, when you start a friendship first, that's where this person can get to really know who you are. And that's where we kind of really talked about my anxiety.

How did he respond? He was really open. He was really proud that I was able to share such an important thing with him. And it didn't actually jeopardise anything. In fact, it kind of brought us closer in terms of our intimacy. Poor and alike. We've just been talking about your husband, Rob, was honest with you. But did you understand what it meant when he told you he was suffering from depression

not at all i mean he told me about four weeks into our relationship which you know is fairly early um but there it was it was problematic because on the one hand yes you know he was open and honest about it and and i really commended him for doing that but these things are so layered right like as i don't really know despite the fact that he knew he struggled with chronic depression um had uh you know had real difficulty with it especially in his 20s I don't think he fully grasped how for example something like depression would impact getting married having kids and certainly when he told me, I had no understanding, no context of depression, you know, as far as I knew, no one in my family who I now subsequently

know have had depression, no one really talked about it. It's not something you're taught in school, you know, it's something that it's incredibly hard not to be slightly bitter about the fact that I was taught how to use you know a javelin for example in PE a skill that I have not used since I was 14 whereas you know maybe I don't know like looking back in hindsight a conversation about mental health and coping mechanisms or even it didn't need to necessarily be this very intense you know lesson but just an understanding that you know what there are some people that struggle with mental illness um this intense, you know, lesson, but just an understanding that, you know, what, there are some people that struggle with mental illness. This is what, you know, this is how it affects a person. But because I didn't know any of that, I had no idea what questions to ask

him. When did it become clear to you then, after he told you, honestly, at the very beginning of your relationship, that this is something I'm struggling with. When did it become clear to you that this was a big problem? I think it was in the first year of us being married. So when we were doing our wedding planning, you know, I was very busy with making plans. And I remember him telling me, listen, just to let you know, there's nothing to be alarmed. I'm going to the doctor. I think I need some mild antidepressants. But again, it was couching this very, you know, I've got it in hand. It's all fine way. And it didn't seem to really have that much of an impact. But in our first year of being married, you know, you have this expectation of what that year should be like. And I could just see him getting gradually, gradually more ill, more withdrawn, you know, really seem to be struggling with it.

And I think that it was a few months of just experiencing that and also him not really being able to articulate, you know, really seem to be struggling with it. And I think that it was a few months of just experiencing that and also him not really being able to articulate, you know, what was going on. It wasn't like we had a in-depth chat about how his depression was affecting him and so on. It was all the, I'm fine, I'm fine. Don't worry about me. I'm fine. But a few months into that, I thought, oh, this is a lifelong thing. this isn't something that he's had at one point and it's going to go away or if he takes tablets uh and I'm doing quote marks on radio you know it's going to fix it um it I was like oh this this is we're in it for the long haul now and we need to figure out how this is going to impact us and more importantly impact him who was supporting you

no one really um I didn't really know that I needed support. I know that that sounds really naive but it was something that I felt that as a married couple we should be able to tackle together. I as his spouse should have been able to support him through this because again I just didn't have a well-rounded understanding of how formidable an illness like depression could be especially you know to the level that he had it um so a lot of it was muddling through and a lot of it was doing it alone alan you are here with your wife karen you've you've come through this what was the trigger for your depression first of all and how did you deal with it as a couple uh well i'm just quite gobsmacked by the two beautiful ladies next

to me uh although my wife is beautiful as well but i didn't know i had depression so i'm very when the two ladies here sort of said their husbands or partners had said oh we've got depression well i never thought i had i just thought i got down every now and again and that was like getting down after going on holiday and wanting to come back to work and not wanting to. So, I mean, for me, I never thought I had it. I mean, mine was caused by an incident when I was three and a half and my mum nearly died. And there was tons of blood everywhere. And I was unable to go next door and get a neighbour at three and a half because I couldn't reach the door knocker.

So that was quite traumatic. But I just put that to one side and just carried on with my life. And it was only in 2014 when I think two ladies here said their husbands had gone to the doctors. Well, my wife had to drag me there. She'd already said to me, go to the doctors, you're not well. So I did. I went to the doctors and said, I've got a bad back because there was nothing wrong with my brain because when I was going through it I felt bad but I felt that's just how life was and then she had to drag me because lots of things happened and I just couldn't get out of bed for a week what were those triggers what were the symptoms the symptoms were I it's hard to explain really I felt down. I couldn't do anything. So I loved my sport. I loved Tottenham Hotspur Football Club,

although it did give me some depression at times. But I was just laying watching games, bored, senseless. Bored. I was watching my favourite programmes on telly. Bored. I just couldn't be bothered with life. I grew a beard, didn't wash for a week. And then my wife was like,

you have got to go to the doctors and dragged me there like a little boy. And even when I saw the doctor and he said, are you I said I'm fine how difficult was it to get through to Alan it was incredibly difficult it's interesting that the two ladies said that their partner's husbands said to them they were unwell well Alan didn't realize he was unwell and I didn't realize he was unwell and actually that was very difficult for me there was an extreme amount of guilt when he was getting better actually that I never recognised he was unwell because we live together and you you feel you should know but you don't because you're living you're getting on with your daily life and when he actually I call it his crash in 2014 when he

just stopped doing everything that was so unlike him and then I knew there was something wrong and then you start to look at the behavior and the behavior over the past few years was irrational and becoming more and more irrational so that's when you sort of think no actually we seriously need to do something. And it was difficult to get him there. And even when we were in the doctor's surgery, to get him to speak about his actual symptoms rather than a gloss,

again, really, really difficult. What pressure did that put on your relationship? There was a lot of pressure on our relationship because then I became a carer, but I didn't know I was a lot of pressure on our relationship because then i became a carer but i didn't know i was a carer because i wasn't a personal carer and what poorness said really resonated with me about you just muddle along because you do i tried to keep as much normality in my life as possible and that was probably more for my sanity than for his but i thought oh this will be really good for him I didn't know what to do to help him

but you do your best you just try and do your very best it's quite intriguing because Karen would sort of say she was brilliant she was absolutely fantastic but every now and again would say is it me and I think you said that and um oh god you know you got so I couldn't talk to her because there was a fear that i'm going to go i feel dreadful and she was brilliant but inadvertently would say is it me and then i'd fly off the handle storm off out the house because it's like nothing to do with you but i didn't know what it was i had no idea that i was unwell linda that must be the natural reaction for a lot of people who's who are suffering or their partner's suffering to look inwardly and to blame themselves.

Yes, I think that that often happens and it's difficult. I mean, I'm really moved by the stories I've just heard and they're not so unusual. I've heard people many times before say, I just didn't realise I wasn't well and I didn't realise I wasn't well. And I didn't realise that something was going on. It's very difficult for partners, I think.

There may be things going on between you. There may be problems that you need to sort out. Or it may simply be that that person, like, is it Alan? Alan was saying that, you know, this is something within me that I was struggling with, and this isn't to do with you. But you can end up kind of thinking, is it me? And I think that's where it's really important that when people are getting help for depression or um related mental health problems like that that your partner is included as much as possible because

they need they need support as well nicole what do you do in your relationship now what do you need from your other half when you're having anxiety mental health problems um for me it's patience um i think that's one of the key things that my partner's been really really supportive with um what's interesting is that although i was really conscious of what was going on um with myself i think there is this danger for many relationships to kind of rely on your partner to kind of be that earpiece and i made the decision that I actually didn't want to just relay everything and unpack everything because that would put so much strain in our relationship because I would then be expecting him to answer all the questions that I couldn't answer.

So I recently decided to go to therapy and to really talk to a professional about the things that I was battling. And that meant that took the strain off our relationship and it meant that I wasn't always sitting down with him expecting him to respond to me like a therapist would um and but instead you know when i go through the process of therapy relaying what i have learned back to him so he understands my development and knows that how i'm progressing really but that was like the biggest change that i think um had really really affected our relationship so patience. Poonam did you feel the pressure to to fix Rob to fix your partner?

I think it's just when you're in a relationship and you really love the other person you know they're the most important person in your life you just desperately want them to be well it's not necessarily a question of fixing whatever it is it's just that you don't want them to be going through this awful thing that you have no control over. And I think that, yes, that does, that can put a lot of pressure because, you know, you, when you don't know what to say, you may say unhelpful things like, hey, it'll be great. You know, why don't you get out of bed and why don't you do this and why don't you do that? And you're coming from a perspective of not quite understanding that they literally can't and the word gloss has been used you know and i would say yeah okay it may sound like rob was in control of what his treatment and so on by actively going to the doctor he wasn't at all i mean it was up to a point like in terms of getting like proper help or talking to me about how it affected him we only had a genuine conversation such as,

I literally, I can't go to the supermarket. I can't open my post. I can't do the things that I would have just assumed and he had no problem with. And understanding the level at which, let's say an illness like depression could be affecting a person that shared the same bed as me, who I really should have known all of that stuff about.

It can make you feel incredibly helpless. But at the same same time I think arming your other half with that knowledge just makes you so much better at being able to help them than putting on this kind of um you know this this I guess like facade is a wrong word but it's more like a front that everything's okay like I don't think if you're in a loving relationship with someone I don't think that you expect your other half to be perfect and to not have any flaws like the whole thing is that you're invested in it and you want to help them whatever kind of stuff they're going through in the same way that they would do exactly the same for you when and how did you realize it all become too much for you I think it was when I started to go running a lot, which is actually quite common for people to do

when I think that they're dealing with stuff in their relationship that they don't quite know how to solve, you know. But I think it was when I just realised that I had become unbelievably anxious. I was overreacting about things. I hadn't really done the things that I enjoyed, like hanging out with my friends, because I thought he would never have asked me to stay at home,

but I felt I needed to be at home, because otherwise I knew that he would never make an effort with things. And I think it was just feeling really emotional all the time, had lost a lot of weight, like didn't realise until I now look back at pictures, you know, how much weight I had lost. And I think there came a turning point where, you know, he just said, I feel like I'm ruining your life

and I really want you to go out there and to do the things that make you happy. It didn't happen overnight, but it was, you know, slowly, slowly making plans with friends again, you know, checking in on him. I even booked like an actual weekend break on my own so I could have some time to myself. That for me was a really important thing because that was so restorative and I realized that I could do that

stuff and he would kind of be okay and even if he wasn't okay me being at home watching him like 24 7 was not going to be the thing that would make him feel better in fact it would probably make him feel more guilty yeah and he took his own life he did yeah so he um he passed away in 2015 um i think that a huge part of what contributed to that was that he had a dual diagnosis so he also was struggling with addiction so it wasn't just depression that he was dealing with um and i think that having read you know clinical books about it when you have a person who struggles with addiction and depression, as he did, struggled with depression since he was a child, for, you know, over maybe a couple of decades,

it is very hard because the two things basically work in tandem to completely erode and undermine everything that makes the foundation of who you are as a person and your coping mechanisms. It is very hard for a person to then just be able to turn things around really quickly you know and i think things had just gotten to a point for him where number one the depression made him feel like he just didn't really want to be here anymore it was just so hard to cope with and on the other hand um what the addiction gave him was this un unbelievable sense of shame around who he was as a person.

The fact that he failed at, you know, his various roles of being a husband, being a brother, a son. And he reached a very, very dark point. And he passed away when he was visiting family in New Zealand. While all of this was going on. Yeah. Did you speak to your family about what was going on? Did people at work know? No one at work knew.

I kept the things very, very separate. You kept all of this secret from the people you worked with? Yeah, so all of this was kept secret. They knew that the first time that he had to go into a psychiatric hospital, which was in 2014, I let my boss know because I needed him to know why I wasn't okay and why sometimes I might need to work from home. But they didn't know about the fact that he was struggling with addiction.

My best mate, I told about maybe 10 months in to when I found out he was an addict, which I didn't know during when we met. My sister did know, but very, very, very few people knew about it. And that, to be honest, that was, I think, you just get on with it, don't you? I just thought I work can't know because I was doing a very senior job. I couldn't let the cracks in that kind of exterior show. But subsequently, since he has passed away, I cannot compartmentalize my life like that. Like it actually makes me feel nauseous

to do that and actually i'm physically and mentally not capable of doing that anymore linda i want to say what's the key to relationship surviving when someone has is going through mental health problems issues what advice would you have for somebody who's perhaps listening, they're suffering or their partner's suffering? I think the people in the studio there, the other guests have said a great deal that's very important. Being a good listener, trying to understand, trying to get the other person to talk. Sometimes they won't talk, but trying to get them to talk. Trying to encourage them to seek help, making sure that they are seeing someone.

But the really important point I think that Poonam mentioned there and is looking after yourself because this can have really quite a considerable impact on you as a partner. And it's really important to take care of yourself and get support, get people that you can talk to as well. You can't be your therapist. You can't be your partner's therapist. And that was another point that someone else made. You can't. Some people do feel a tremendous desire to sort of put the other person back together and to help them. Some people feel a need to do that. And it isn't a very good thing to be doing.

It isn't a terribly healthy thing to be doing. We can't change other people. We can only do our best to listen to them, to support them, to help them. When I'm feeling down, my husband is brilliant in terms of just gently challenging me and saying, you're not as well as you should be. You're not as well as you could be. I know that there's a couple of things on your mind just by the way you've been behaving. You've been a bit irritable or a bit edgy lately. Is there something that's bothering you?

He picks up those kind of early warning signs with me, which are important. I know what my own early warning signs are as well, but he's very good at just noticing those things and just being very considerate and supportive. You mentioned going for a run. I'd say that doing things with the person is important, doing things together, not necessarily saying, let's have a talk. But what we do sometimes is we go out for a walk and we do a lot of our talking when we're out for a walk where there's no pressure to talk, but we just chat as we go along and that can some of our best conversations are had when we're out walking and a final word from all of you the advice you'd give to anybody listening yeah um i think i've everything that's

been said has resonated with me in terms of of caring and it's the big thing i think is not giving up because it is really hard when you're in it as a carer and keep on keeping on really is important but of course not forgetting the most important thing ever is for the person who is unwell to have help alan absolutely um just Alan? Just do whatever works so was it Linda who was saying different things some of that will work for me, some of it won't you know the person you love Karen knew me really well

she knew what worked for me and we tried different things and I think that's just the major thing know your partner and know what works for them I would say it's kindness it's kindness to the person who you are with but it is also kindness to

yourself because you can't be a kind person if you aren't looking after yourself as well. And final word to you Nicole? Yeah I think I definitely want to echo about taking care of yourself because I think it's so important to take care of someone else like that notion of not being able to pour out of an empty cup.

I think it's really, really important that we do whatever it takes to take care of ourselves through any kind of activities or any kind of self-care regimens to ensure that we're OK within ourselves, too. Nicole, Purnah, Linda, Alan, Karen, thank you for sharing with us this morning. There are links to support and advice on the Women's Hour website. Now still to come, how unconscious racial bias shapes what we see, what we think and what we do. Jennifer Eberhardt,

the author of a new book called Bias, the New Science of Race and Inequality joins me. And if you heard yesterday's special programme about true crime, you can find an article on the Women's Hour website with five reasons and why our guests think women love the genre. Now, if you didn't know,

British Charcuterie Live is taking place today at Borough Market in London. It's a chance to meet, sample and chat to top charcuterie producers from across the UK. And I'm delighted to be joined by its founder, Henrietta Green. Good morning. Good morning. Now, for people who don't know, what is charcuterie? Well, charcuterie basically is cured meat, pure and simple. So it can cover the whole gamut of meat, poultry and game, and it can be cured, it can be smoked.

So there are all kinds of sort of very traditional British things that we have like hams, bacons and then there are all the continental ones the salamis, the brasaolas, the coppers so it's the whole range of products. Where does the UK stand in terms of charcuterie production? Well it's jolly interesting that because we have always had charcuterie, we've always cured meat, but in a very sort of traditional British way so that we would cure it, brine it in salt with maybe some flavourings and either dry or wet and then hang it to dry and then it would be cooked. And that was our kind of hams, our kind of bacons, etc. Recently, there's been this huge upsurge of small speciality craft producers,

a lot of them farmers, some of them chefs who've sort of taken away, the butchers revived the craft. And what they've done is to sort of adopted a much more continental style. So suddenly we are making all our own tsunamis, our prosciutas, our coppers. Well, you say we are all making, not me. Nor me either. I just eat them and represent them. So it's been really exciting, this whole growth. Over the last, maybe sort of it started quietly 10 years and it's got bigger and bigger.

So last year, actually, we launched the British Charcuterie Life Awards and we had over 80 producers with over 450 products entered. And the standard is getting there. We've got some amazingly good ones. We've got some not so good ones. But the producers, and they're all the craft producers who know, care, source their meat carefully, work very carefully in a very small, interesting scale. So it's one, if you think British wine,

English sparkling wine 15 years ago, you laughed at it. Now it's worldwide. That's what's going to happen to British charcuterie. Increasingly, we hear about the risks of processed meats. How difficult is it being a producer of meat in 2019? Well, it's difficult being a producer of any kind of food in 2019, particularly with meat and particularly with processed meat,

because there are a lot of people going on about, banging on about sort of scares about this about that what i would like to say is that with a lot of the scares with processed meat they're talking about the really heavily processed meat the nuggets the extruded the mechanically recovered meat which charcuterie producers what they're tending to do is to work with the whole muscle the carcass they know where they've sourced their meat. Then they will cure it. And then they will create their products.

So although it is processed, it's not processed in the sense that you think it might be. So it doesn't contain all these sort of different additives that people are worried about. So perhaps if you're worried and people are saying, well, bacon and everything, have it. But just have it not that often. It's like all things, in moderation. Exactly. And you have brought something in for me to taste, for us,

for the team to taste. For everybody. So we've got two very well i bought a lot because i thought everybody so we've got two very two very different products so the first one there is as you might expect a prosciutto it's a cured ham and this one last year's award of the best product of the british charcuterie live awards and it's so is it i mean delicious it is absolutely delicious it's as good as any italian producer it's made by a farm called beale's farm they farm their own mangalitza pig which is a special fatty breed and then they cure it carefully with great sort of style and it's

just got such great length of flavor now that's a really typical italian style product the other one that i bought that doesn't look as familiar, this one. Ah, well, now that is actually an English-style product. So that is the cheek. The bath chaps the cheek. See, and now I'm hesitating. Go for it. And it's been cured with a wonderful blend of spices and salts

and then lightly smoked. So it's got a wonderful gelatinous... To be fair, that is delicious. I know, it is. Also very tasty. And it's sort of rich and fatty and gorgeous, just like you might hope charcuterie to be. And they were both award-winning products.

And it just shows the whole range and the different styles that you can have of products. And what are some of the more unusual styles and methods of curing that you're seeing now? Well, what is interesting, yes, with flavours, what is interesting is that if you're going to have British charcuterie, to me it's not only just going to emulate and follow in the foreign tradition, but looking at using our own kind of flavours, sort of the bilberries from the wild. And one which actually, having said that, is very much continental flavour, but an extraordinary subtle mixture is a venison salami, which is cured with cocoa and chilli.

Now, those two combinations, the chocolate and the chilli, are very Mexican. And then to put it in this subtly flavored venison, it is amazingly different. And then you've got people working with cider, with different mustards, working out with flavors. But then our producer, our top producer, who's a wonderful chef, his blend of spices is so invigorating that actually when you try his products it's called tempers they are just wonderful and it lightens the whole aspect i mean it is an exciting new industry and i hope that everybody will come down and see us today at barrow market yes you can go and taste and talk to charcuterie producers um thank you very much for coming in, Henrietta. Thank you for having me. Please do leave the rest of that there for us, for the team, not just for me. I will.

Henrietta Green, thank you very much. Thank you. Founder of Charcuterie Live. Now, everyone is vulnerable to unconscious bias. That's according to Jennifer Eberhardt, professor of psychology at Stanford University, who spent years researching how racial bias is ever present in our lives. She's written a book which takes a scientific look at the ways in which we behave subconsciously in response to people who look different to us.

It's called Biased, the New Science of Race and Inequality. And Jennifer joins me in the studio now. Welcome. What do you mean, Jennifer, when you talk about unconscious bias and how is it different from racism? Well, yeah, so unconscious bias is something that we're all vulnerable to. And in my book, I describe the science behind it. And it can be defined as the beliefs and the feelings that we have about social groups that can influence our decision making and our behavior, even when we're not aware of it. What made you want to study it? Well, I feel like it's a big issue.

It's an issue that is consuming us at this moment in time. In the U.S., for example, just a couple weeks ago, there was a Pew survey that went out and they found that six in 10 Americans feel that race relations are generally bad in the US and that they're getting worse. And I feel that that's the case in lots of countries right now. You tell a story in the beginning of your book about one of your three sons when he was five years old and on a plane. What happened? Oh, so, yes. So this was when my when he was five years old and on a plane. What happened? Oh, so, yes. So this was when my son was just five years old. He was on this plane with me and he was just looking all around

and excited about, you know, flying with mommy. And he sees a guy and he says, hey, that guy looks like daddy. Now, I look at the guy and I notice he's the only black guy on the plane. And before I could have this conversation, you know, with my son about how not all black people look alike, he looks up and he says, I hope he doesn't rob the plane. And I said, what? You know, and he said it again. I hope he doesn't rob the plane. And I'm like, you know, daddy wouldn't rob a plane.

Why would you say that? And he looked at me with this really sad face and he said, I don't know why I said that. I don't know why I was thinking that. And so this is what you research. Why would a five-year-old say something like that, given, especially in your case, you study this for a living? Well, they're out in the world just as we are and just absorbing, you know, what's out there in the social environment. And so they pick it up and don't know that they've picked it up. So you kind of, as a child too, your whole purpose is to try to understand what goes with what and

what correlates with what. And you see people out in the world, you're trying to figure out what, you know, sort of how people see them. And so they look to us to figure out, you know, how to feel about other people. But this is, you know, we call it unconscious racial bias. This is subtle messaging. It's not that somebody is saying, you know, all black people are criminals or somebody's going to rob a plane. So where is that coming from? Yes, it's coming from multiple places. It's coming even from, you know, I have another son who was telling me in first grade, asking me whether black people were seen in a different way from white people. And when I asked him why, he would think that he says, well, we were in a grocery store and there was a black guy who came

into the grocery store. And I noticed people kind of stepped away from him and gave them a lot of room. And when he stood in line, his was the shortest line. And so he's seeing how we move through the world and, you know, trying to put together like, what does that mean? You know, what does that mean about how black people are seen? And he, in his mind, thought, well, maybe it has to do with fear. You know, maybe it's fear that, you know, that gets attached to black people in a different way. You've done a lot of work with Oakland police. We know black men are more likely to be in prison than white men. You've been looking at routine police stops in particular. What did you find?

Well, we found that there were racial disparities in who the police stopped. So at the time, Oakland was about 28 percent African-American, but they represented over 60 percent of the police stops. And there were racial disparities also in the searches, disparities in arrests, disparities in handcuffing, even when there was no arrest. And so everywhere we looked, pretty much, we saw, you know, huge racial disparities there. And, you know, there's disagreement about what those disparities mean. So if you talk to the police, they'll say, well, you know, they're just kind of going to where the crime is, and these are the people who are committing crime. And so that's why you see the disparities. But if you go and talk to the community members, they're thinking, well, no, this has to do with the, you know thinking, well, no, this has to do with the,

you know, policing practices and strategies. This has to do with the bias of individual officers. And they want it, you know, to end. They want to figure out ways that the police and community members can have better relationships, better trust and fewer disparities of this type. What was their response to this research when you presented it to them? Did they make any changes? Well, the police department? Yes, they did. Actually, they changed their handcuffing policy. They also made changes even to what they do when they stop someone.

So now when they stop someone, they always, you know, complete a form to say, you know, who they stopped and why and so forth. But they added a question onto the form that says, was this stop intelligence led or not? Yes or no? And what they mean by intelligence led is that, you know, did you have evidence to tie this specific person to a particular crime? Yes or no? And just adding that question caused them to slow down and think about whether this was a high priority stop and so forth. Do I really need to stop this person? And we found that after adding that question, that the number of stops in the city dropped by 40%.

There's a lot in your book that makes for pretty depressing reading, if I'm honest. In terms of your research into, I mean, even just people applying for jobs, people whitening their CVs. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's a big thing for college students. And so there are researchers who looked at this with both African American and Asian students who were undergraduates, who were just about to graduate and go on the job market. And a lot of them feared that their race would be held against them. And so they tried to whiten their resumes just to get into the door to get an interview. How? How did they whiten their resumes?

Well, they would change their names to sort of anglicize their names. And then I think for Asian students, they would also, you know, they would say that they liked extracurricular activities that were more, that they associated with as being more white, like snowboarding and, you know, those kinds of things, because they felt they'd have a problem with people thinking that they could fit in culturally, that they could be relatable, that they could be one of the, you know, sort of one of the gang in a way. And despite doing that, statistically, they're still less likely to get the job over somebody white. Well, if they whiten the name and they change, sort of whiten themselves in a way,

right, change their interest and so forth in a direction that they think would be more acceptable to whites, they actually do have an advantage. Tell me about facial recognition, because you've also written in the book about segregated neighbourhoods. You were brought up in a black area and then moved to a white neighborhood. And you talk about how you had no practice in recognizing white faces. That's right. Yeah, so I had a really tough time.

I was worried when I moved to the neighborhood that I wouldn't have friends and that I didn't know if I would feel that I belonged and all of those kinds of things. But the students were super friendly and they welcomed me. But I still had problems making friends because I could not tell their faces apart. And it's interesting because when I get mistaken for other Asian broadcasters, and I joke, girl, do we all look the same?

To you, all white people look the same. Well, they did. They did. But now they don't because I was in an the, you know, I was in an all black neighborhood when I was a kid and now I'm in a multicultural, you know, space. And so my brain has had lots of practice at recognizing white faces. And so now I'm fine. And there's science behind that. There's science behind it. Decades and decades of science behind it, as it turns out. You've also looked at gender in the workplace. Oh, yes, yes, yes. We've looked at sort of gender issues in terms of the same kind of thing with the resumes,

for example. So, you know, women are less likely to get callbacks than men are. And we've looked at sort of gender in terms of even orchestras. There's a really interesting study looking at women in orchestras in the U.S., and they just weren't being hired. And there were all these stereotypes about who they were and how they couldn't play and they didn't have what it took and so forth. And the industry actually instituted this blind auditioning. So everyone would, you know, audition behind a dark curtain so you couldn't see the person's identity. And when they instituted that, the number of women in orchestra shot way up. And you also very quickly write that the colourblind approach of not picking up on colour could impede our move towards inequality.

Well, yeah, so there is some research on that, right? That, you know, if we just don't see color at all, like if we try to ignore color, then, you know, that's the best thing, that that's what we want to do and that's how you achieve racial inequality in particular. But the research shows that that's not always true. Like sometimes when you try to teach your children, for example, to ignore color, they also ignore the discrimination that could come with color.

And so you're actually teaching them to do the opposite, to actually ignore inequality rather than combat it. That was Jennifer Eberhardt, professor of psychology at Stanford University. Her book, Biased, The New Science of Race and Inequality, is out now. Now, we got quite a big reaction to our conversation about how to cope with mental health problems in relationships. Sue emailed us. Dear wonderful woman's hour, hurrah for a discussion on living with a partner who suffers from poor mental health. Many thanks to the brave folk in the studio i've been married for over 40 years to a lovely man who can periodically be transformed by deep depression he had no diagnosis until 20 years ago and since then he's been on medication understanding is the key to managing any situation

but still outsiders can be cruel in their ignorance because there's not much information in circulation generally. This email's come in, they want to stay anonymous and they say my children are seven and four. My husband's on and off dark days manifested itself into terrible depression and anxiety after the birth of our first child due to his own childhood trauma being a partner to someone with severe depression is hard enough but doing it with small children is the most terrible difficult painful experience you're essentially a lone parent but without anybody understanding that and with a grown adult to parent as well you're trying to protect your

partner from the children's noise and energy and your children from your partner's withdrawal, self-harm and anger. And this message from Philippa, who says, thank you for this conversation today. My husband of 20 years recently announced he was divorcing me, largely due to my emotional, poor mental health, and that he'd felt compelled to act and subsequently began a new relationship I was typical of a certain generation who had no understanding education or awareness that I developed anxiety and depression and it had worsened considerably over the years I didn't realize how much I was unwell how much it probably ran in the family how much I needed therapy and medication as has been quoted today and the final email comes from Peter who again says thank you for the program the guests were superb

and spoke directly to my own experience of depression for me it comes from nowhere and for no apparent reason I can feel it creeping up on me at the moment and tend to try and hide it your guests spoke clearly to the fact that I need to be open with friends. In brackets, I'm single and not be ashamed. I am going to try that. I'm glad to hear that. If you suffer from any of the issues or need help with any of the issues we've been talking about, there are links to advice and help on the Woman's Hour website.

Coming up on tomorrow's Woman's Hour, two women describe what it's like to go it alone and try for a baby using a donor. One has had a baby with the help of donor sperm, another's pregnant using a double donor route and if you don't know that is using a donor egg and donor sperm. So what led them to make this decision, what has the experience been like so far and how have their friends, family and health professionals reacted to them? Beyond Today is the daily podcast from Radio 4. It asks one big question about one big story in the news and beyond. Just how big is Netflix? Why are young people getting lost in the system? I'm Tina Dehealy. I'm Matthew Price. And along with a team of curious producers, we are searching for answers that change the way we see the world. I was

actually quite shocked by how many people this issue affects. So we're doing stories about technology, about identity. Are you trying to look black? No, I am not trying to look black. Power, where power lies, how it's changing. And every weekday we speak to the smartest people in the BBC and beyond. It's basically what I've been wanting to do since I was little, to talk about business and economics. And the stories started forming in my head. That's what I've learned. It's okay to feel. Subscribe to us on BBC Sounds. And join in on the hashtag Beyond Today. 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.