[Ethereal melody;
Soothing, bell-like percussion]
[Delicate violin plucking]
[Sustained, warm violin tone joins]
[Music fades]
[Soft, unsettling music;
Wind rustles faintly]
[Seagulls shriek]
[Laboured breathing]
[Music fades]
[Woman coughs]
[Shuffled footsteps]
[Woman grunts]
[Elizabeth] When you think of witches
is this what you see?
[Propulsive, percussive music]
[Gong resonates]
[Gong resonates]
[Gong resonates]
As a little girl,
like so many little girls
I wanted to be
a witch.
[Hypnotic, rhythmic drum beats]
On grey winter days
I heard their songs in the woods.
[Drum beats continue,
woman vocalises ethereally]
At night they danced in my dreams.
I longed to join their secret rituals.
I brewed potions from flowers and herbs.
Wrote spell books
that I hid under my pillow.
[Lightning thunders]
And I chanted my desires over
and over again
trying to make something, anything, happen
in my quiet little world.
[Soft whispering]
I read books about witches
I saw them on TV,
[Magical chime]
but most of all
I watched them at the cinema.
You girls watch out for those weirdos.
We are the weirdos, mister.
[Bus doors hiss;
Percussive music ends]
[Elizabeth] I still remember seeing
The Wizard Of Oz
for the first time.
From the moment Dorothy
stepped into that technicolour land
I was spellbound.
[Dreamy, orchestral music]
[Birds chirp]
The Wizard Of Oz
showed me
that there are two types of witches.
We have Glinda with her white magic,
her sweet temperament,
and her sparkling, traditional beauty.
Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
I'm not a witch at all.
Witches are old and ugly.
Only bad witches are ugly.
[expl*si*n rumbles]
[Elizabeth] And we have
the Wicked Witch of the West,
whose sickly green skin and evil demeanour
- has become an indelible cultural image.
- [Tense, taut music]
I'll get you, my pretty.
[Wicked Witch]
And your little dog too!
[Wicked Witch cackles]
[Elizabeth] I wanted to be a good witch,
I couldn't understand why
any woman would choose to be bad.
[Music fades]
I didn't know then what I know now,
that being good or bad
isn't a choice
a woman gets to make for herself.
[Eerie, ambient music]
The Wicked Witch was supposed to scare us
but she was also created
as a warning for women and girls.
Behave, and be beautiful,
or we will destroy you.
Women have been taught
this lesson for centuries
so that now
it is embroidered onto our bones
mixed with our blood
- tattooed onto our beating hearts.
- [Music swells]
It is in our culture,
in all our stories.
Women are pitted against each other.
The virgin.
The wh*re.
The maiden.
The crone.
The good witch
and the bad witch.
It is a narrative
that is so successfully pervasive
that we repeat it to each other.
We police our sisters,
our neighbours, our friends.
sl*t.
What did you say?
You heard her.
[Women whisper]
[Woman] She's not wearing a bra.
[Elizabeth] This vicious narrative
empowered those who are threatened by us
to believe that their fear
and hatred of women is correct.
That they are right to persecute us.
A few months after
I watched The Wizard Of Oz
I learned in school about
the women who had been m*rder*d
in the witch trials
that took place across Europe and America
hundreds of years ago.
Their stories haunted me.
I became obsessed with them,
carrying their names
around with me like charms.
Reciting them to myself
when I felt anxious or lonely.
- [Ominous hum]
- Anna Moats.
Elizabeth Clarke.
Mary Scrutton.
Katherine Grady.
Mary Hicks.
Isabella Rigby.
- Janet Horne.
- [Elizabeth whispers names]
Ruth Osborne.
Agnes Waterhouse.
Elizabeth Device.
Anne Whittle. Jane Bulcock.
Susannah Smith.
[Elizabeth whispers rapidly;
Ominous hum intensifies]
- [Ominous hum halts]
- Anna Moats.
Some of those witches
were healers and midwives
helping their communities
with their skills.
Others were outcasts,
living on the edge of their village.
[Uneasy ambient music]
And some of them had lost their minds.
This resonated with me
because I have always been stalked
by the shadow of madness.
As a child I made deals
with unknown forces
believing certain behaviours
would keep me safe.
At night I would talk for hours
to people who didn't exist.
- And I constructed worlds in my head,
- [Delicate chimes]
that were so visceral, so solid and alive
that I wanted to stay in them forever.
As I got older,
I poured my madness into my work
and found I was able to control it,
even use it.
And I said goodbye to the witches,
letting them fade away into childhood.
[Music continues]
I was happy.
I was safe.
[Music swells;
Ethereal vocalising]
But that was just an illusion.
[Loud crash, glass shatters]
[Child giggles, quick footsteps]
Three years ago, I gave birth to my son.
Within a month,
I was admitted to a psychiatric ward.
The madness had found me again.
And the witches?
[Eerie hum]
They were so close now
I could feel their breath
on the back of my neck.
As I shuffled from room to room
I caught glimpses of them.
Felt their bony hands on me
when I lay awake at night.
- They sung to me from the sea.
- [Eerie hum intensifies]
Called me into the woods,
inviting me to join them.
Until eventually...
[Vocalising halts]
I did.
[Haunting, instrumental music]
[Vocalising resumes, swells]
[Vocalising subsides, resonates]
I've always been scared
to be ugly and messy.
[Haunting music continues]
Scared to show my wickedness
and my weakness.
But I don't care anymore.
I need you to know how it feels
to lose your mind completely.
I want you to see what I saw
feel what I felt.
So I'm going to drag you
into this spell with me
because while I survived
far too many
have not.
[Music subsides]
[Muffled heartbeat]
Pregnancy is a strange time
- at once mundane yet wildly magical.
- [Muffled heartbeat fades]
And looking back I can see
that this was when the madness
started crawling towards me.
[Birds chirp]
As my body rapidly transformed
the edges of reality began to blur.
- I no longer felt tied to the present,
- [Bell tolls]
instead existing in some strange,
liminal space,
connected to all the women
throughout history
who had made this journey before me.
The doors to the past
and the future were open
And I felt like
I was walking between two worlds.
Asleep and awake.
And no one had ever told me
being pregnant could feel like this.
Films had taught me
I was supposed to be calm
pretty,
soft and pink.
What is it?
It moved!
What moved?
The baby, it moved!
[Elizabeth] But I didn't feel like that.
I felt out of control.
[Static, unsettling hum]
I was a storm
wild and unmoored.
[Hypnotic, rhythmic drum beats]
I was a fire.
And because of that disconnection,
I found pregnancy
an anxious and lonely time.
I counted down the days
till it would be over.
I couldn't wait to hold my son in my arms
- to feel his warm body on my skin.
- [Sweet, emotive drums beats]
After his birth I was elated,
I was on a high.
I couldn't sleep
because I didn't need to sleep.
I was too excited, too mad with love.
But then
everything started to go wrong.
[Drum beats turn unsettling]
What follows is my testimony.
[Music snaps to silence]
[Woman] Thank you.
Okay, so.,
my son was born on a Wednesday
in a heat wave,
and by the Sunday night,
I was starting to feel
very strange.
I remember my husband was holding our baby
and he asked me to take him,
just for a minute
and I couldn't.
He was standing in the living room.
And I remember I sort of started,
involuntarily
backing away into the kitchen.
I was just terrified.
It was a fear
that I have never known before.
I wanted to run away.
We drove to A&E at midnight
our son, tiny, in his little car seat
and sat in this sticky,
sweaty room while a doctor...
I remember this really clearly
because he had really red hair
and then these bright blue scrubs.
Dr Ben, he was called.
He started asking me
a series of questions.
[Woman]
In the last week,
how often have you been bothered
by feeling down, depressed or hopeless?
[Woman 2]
How often have you had little
interest or pleasure in doing things?
[Woman 3]
How often
have you been bothered by
trouble falling or staying asleep,
or sleeping too much?
I would become very familiar
with these questions
over the next few months.
[Woman]
How often have you been
bothered by feeling bad
about yourself,
or that you are a failure
or have let yourself or your family down?
[Eerie resonating hum]
After listening to me explain
how I'd been feeling
Dr Ben said
it was a classic case of "baby blues"
and that it would probably just
go away on its own.
I went home and tried to carry on.
I tried to hide how I was feeling
but my mental health
was deteriorating rapidly.
I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep
and I was starting to have
thoughts of harming myself.
One night I suddenly felt
an overwhelming urge
to walk out of our house
and head for a nearby bridge
that went over the motorway.
[Wind roars]
I'd seen bunches of flowers there before.
Faded photographs
with names written underneath.
But I'd never been able to understand why
anyone would climb onto the railings
why anyone would jump.
[Wind rumbles]
But now it was taking all my strength
not to run there.
We called the hospital and I remember
the woman on the phone was so kind.
She just kept saying,
"I know, I know. It's awful."
And she called me an ambulance.
When the paramedics arrived,
I was sat on the sofa
and I think by this point I hadn't slept
I think for about ten days
and I couldn't eat.
I just physically couldn't swallow.
It was five in the morning
and I wanted to die.
And one of the paramedics was this guy,
in his fifties or sixties,
And he took one look at me,
sat on the sofa, and he said
"Welcome to parenthood!"
With, like, jazz hands.
And I remember just thinking like...
"Really?!"
This...
This is normal?
I'm supposed to feel like this?
It's supposed to be like this?
He was a very nice man.
He came to see me later
when I was in A&E to check up on me.
But him saying that,
at that point in my illness,
really made me feel
like there was something wrong with me.
Like I wasn't cut out for this,
that I didn't possess
the requisite skills to be a mother.
And it kills me to say this,
knowing what I know now
and knowing how I feel about my son.
But from then on,
I really started to feel like
I'd made a mistake becoming a parent,
and that everyone knew.
And everyone could see it.
Because we all know
what a mother is supposed to be like.
- [Upbeat, whimsical music]
- A good mother is selfless,
her entire identity
consumed by her love for her child.
She is immaculate.
She is youthful, innocent,
almost virginal in her purity.
Her hair flows behind her
as she walks through
a field of wildflowers,
breastfeeding her baby.
She always smells of freshly baked bread
she wears long cotton dresses,
and no makeup.
She glows with love from within.
She never questions her life.
She feels eternally blessed and complete.
She has at least three children
for whom she is the primary caregiver.
She is thin, attractive and stylish.
She is never stressed
never angry
she overflows with compassion, joy
and endless emotional resources.
She is a mother and nothing else
and that is more than enough for her.
And she is happy.
[Music stops]
I was now surrounded by perfect mothers.
They were everywhere.
I was nothing like them.
I was more like
the character of Marlo in
Tully
.
A film I'd seen before,
but which had new resonance
when I watched it again at 4am
while trying to breastfeed.
I was shocked by how much of it felt
- deeply, troublingly relatable.
- [Pensive, ambient music]
Marlo seems to be trapped
in her life with a newborn
repeating the same three hours
over and over again
losing more of herself
as every second ticks by
until she is just a ghost,
who has forgotten who she once was.
Her old life gone forever.
I had finally found a woman
who looked, behaved and felt like me.
But her story didn't end well.
[Music stops]
And I was becoming increasingly suspicious
that mine wouldn't either.
[Haunting, drone-like resonance]
As the sun came up
I went back to the emergency room.
[Resonance fades]
I was prescribed medication
to help me sleep
and I did sleep
and I started formula feeding
which definitely helped.
Although, you know,
also compounded my feelings
of shame and guilt
and that I wasn't an adequate mother.
[Eerie hum]
But that...
that anxiety,
that doom just kept growing.
And it was like this living,
breathing terror.
And we didn't know what to do.
We didn't know what was wrong with me.
And so it became
even easier for me to think
"Right, everything in my life was fine.
- "And then I had a baby
- [Hum continues]
"and now I'm in a horror film.
"So it must be because of the baby
that I feel like that."
At first I was able
to push those thoughts away.
But the longer my illness went on
the harder it became to ignore
the voice in my head
that told me I was only in this situation
- because I had become a mother.
- [Sparse, delicate piano music]
My thoughts about my son became
more sinister.
Maybe if he wasn't here any more
I wouldn't feel like this.
Maybe that was what would finally end
this t*rture.
I was so desperate that I started to fear
there was only one way
to make that happen.
I didn't tell anyone about these thoughts.
They were too evil.
No one would ever understand me
and no one would forgive me
for thinking them.
I knew what happened to women
who hurt their children.
I knew how society treated them
[Music continues]
so I didn't dare tell anyone.
[Eerie vocalising]
Not even the doctors.
[Music and vocalising swell and stop]
Every day I would wake up with this dread.
This doom.
It was like being in...
excruciating pain, physical pain.
And no one can do anything.
There's nothing they can do
to take it away.
Well, they can prescribe you medication
and they can refer you for therapy
but the counselling,
the waitlists for counselling in the UK
especially, are so long.
And the medication
can take up to four weeks to work.
If it works at all.
It was...
It, it really was unbearable.
Before I got ill,
my only awareness of
mental health conditions
around childbirth came from films
where it's very much "baby blues."
"Due to changing hormones
over 80% of all women
"experience postpartum depression."
Well I'm not gonna.
There's a woman
and she's got milk vomit on her sweatshirt
and her hair's all a mess
and she can't stop crying,
she, like, calls her mum
and sobs down the phone for a bit.
[Grandmother]
There he is!
And then in the next scene, she's like
buying shoes or something.
[Soft, eerie rumble]
It really was
like living in a horror film.
My house
This home that had once
felt completely safe
was now the scariest place in the world.
It was visceral. I could...
I could taste the evil in my mouth.
I know that sounds dramatic,
but I don't really know
how else to explain it.
And it did feel like I was possessed.
Like there were two versions of me.
Good me...
I'm glad.
[Elizabeth] And bad me.
I can't exist by myself,
because I'm afraid of myself.
Because I'm the maker of my own evil.
It's the strangest feeling
to exist in your life,
in your world,
and all the pieces of it are still there.
Your home, your friends,
your family, your partner.
Everything is still there.
You can see it, you can touch it.
But all of the colour and the joy
has just drained away.
And things you never
ever thought would happen to you
are happening.
These once unimaginable scenes
are just unfolding around you
and you feel so powerless
because there's no way for you to stop it.
[Ruminative, eerie music]
My friends, my family, my husband,
they all did their best to support me.
But increasingly I began to feel like
I was a burden
and that everyone would be better off
without me.
My son included.
I thought... I thought that if I did die,
if I did k*ll myself
they'd be sad, sure.
But they'd probably also be like
"Oh well, it's for the best.
Yeah, it's for the best."
I really, really believed that.
I started thinking of ways I could do it.
Not so much making plans, but definitely
weighing up my options.
And then I...
- nearly stepped in front of a van
- [Music continues]
only stopping myself because...
I didn't want to do that to someone else.
I was just scared to be alone.
I was even more scared
to be alone with my son because
- I didn't know what I might do to him.
- [Eerie music intensifies]
By now, my brain was playing
a constant loop of hideous scenes.
I saw myself smothering
our son with a pillow
dropping him
from a window on the third floor
drowning him in the bathtub.
And yet I loved him
more than I had ever loved
anyone or anything.
At night, I checked constantly
that he was still breathing.
Watching his little chest rise and fall.
When he wasn't in my arms
I missed him so much my heart ached.
For the first time in my life,
I realised I could hold the good
and the bad in my heart at the same time.
- I could feel both at once.
- [Uneasy drum beats]
That was terrifying.
I felt so alone.
[Drum beats resonate and fade]
[Haunting, drone-like hum]
[Music fades]
Throughout this whole period
I was asking everyone I knew for help.
I was posting on Twitter, which...
Sometimes I regret posting on Twitter
when I wasn't completely in my right mind
but still, I was posting on Twitter.
I was messaging all the parents I knew,
I was talking to women I'd never met
before on the phone about it.
I just wanted someone to say,
"Look, this is the way out
"This is how you get out of this."
And then a friend put me in touch
with a WhatsApp group
of women who'd had similar illnesses
and that just changed everything.
So my name's Shema Tariq
and I'm a doctor
and researcher based at
University College London
working in HIV.
And I'm your friend.
[Elizabeth] Can you just remind me
of how we first met?
So we met in summer of 2020.
And you had just had Bertie?
I think he was like, what?
- Two weeks old, three weeks old?
- [Elizabeth] Yeah.
And you joined this WhatsApp group,
Motherly Love.
[Elizabeth] Can you just
introduce yourself for me?
Of course.
So, my name is Milli and I am a mum of two
and I live in London.
So, Motherly Love is
a peer support group for women
who are struggling with motherhood,
and don't have a space to talk
about the darker side of it.
And we just started it,
as basically, a cup of tea.
Come and have a cup of tea and a biscuit
with other women who don't feel that they
belong within the normal baby group world.
[Elizabeth] They just, they got it,
and they took me seriously.
And whatever f*cked up thoughts
I was having
someone else had had them too,
and they'd got through it.
They'd survived, they'd been there.
It became this vital source of hope
and support, and just knowledge
which didn't seem
to be accessible anywhere else.
No one talks about how hard it is.
Someone will ask you
how it's going and you're expected
to say, "Oh, it's great, I'm really happy.
"This baby is the centre of my world."
And I, I didn't feel like that.
When I had our eldest
Like... She...
I was really unhappy in myself,
but I loved being her mum.
But what started to happen was,
I started to have maternal OCD
where I believed
that I was going to hurt her.
And...
it's such an uncomfortable thing
to talk about because...
I, every night I put her to bed
I had these thoughts
that I would sexually abuse my child
and saying those words out loud
I hardly ever say that to anybody.
But it was the most frightening thing.
And I never spoke
to a single person about it.
And I would self-harm because that
was the only way to stop these thoughts.
And...
I just lived with it.
And it was just so--
It was t*rture.
[Elizabeth] Why do you think
people don't talk about that stuff?
Why do you think it is so hidden?
People are scared.
I think society is scared about engaging
with these more
difficult feelings around motherhood.
We want to feel safe,
don't we, with mothers?
We like to think that mothers are
the place of ultimate safety.
And I think even when we're grown ups
the idea that a mother
might not like her child
is actually deeply terrifying.
It's a sort of very--
Sort of primal fear
about engaging with those sort of--
with that darker side.
[Wind rumbles]
[Elizabeth] I was so scared
to be honest with anyone
about what was really going on in my head.
I thought they'd take my son away from me.
But after Milli, Shema,
and the other women in the group
began to tell me about
their own experiences,
it allowed me to finally be honest.
[Eerie resonance]
And they didn't judge me.
Instead, they responded
with love and compassion.
They made me realise
how serious my illness was
and that this was a situation which
could have potentially tragic outcomes.
So when I told them
I was once again feeling suicidal,
they sprang into action.
Do you remember that day
that you came to my house?
- Yeah, I do, very vividly.
- [Eerie resonance fades]
Partly because my husband was worried.
He was like,
"You're gonna go and just meet
"a stranger who you know nothing about
"who says that she's really,
really struggling.
- "And what are you going to do?"
- [Shema laughs]
I was like, "I'm going
to pick her up and drive her to A&E."
I was worried about you.
I mean, I'd been worried about
you for a few weeks, actually.
And I was anxious about
whether you'd get taken seriously.
So I remember
in that drive, almost trying to coach you,
'cause I just wanted you to get the help
that I thought you needed.
[Elizabeth] At the door
to the hospital Shema said to me,
"You need to tell them everything."
And there was an understanding
between us of what that meant.
She told me that was the only way
to activate the next level of care.
I had tried so many times to get help.
But it wasn't until Shema said that to me
that I felt brave enough to tell the
doctors about the thoughts I was having.
And when I did, they listened.
You help so many people,
I see you do it all the time
and you helped me, you saved my life.
That group saved my life.
So, thank you. Thank you so much.
But isn't it sad?
It's so sad, I think,
to think about our circumstances
and how we met and that it took
effectively a random stranger
to be the person to advocate for you,
to say, "This is what you need to do."
And for Shema and I
to be on the phone to one another saying,
"We need to get her to hospital now."
Why is it down to
average people doing that?
Because if I didn't exist,
that group didn't exist,
who was going to do it?
And that's just so, so sad
because there must be
so many other women who
are going to slip through the net.
It's really tragic.
[Eerie resonance resumes]
[Elizabeth] Two days after Shema
drove me to the emergency room
for that fourth and final time,
I was admitted to a Mother and Baby Unit
which is a psychiatric ward
for new mothers
where their babies stay with
them in hospital.
Walking onto the ward for the first time
I had a sort of...
- dissociation with reality.
- [Eerie resonance builds]
This wasn't happening to me.
I wasn't really here.
This wasn't my life.
I had my son with me.
He was asleep in his pram.
But because of COVID
my husband wasn't allowed
onto the ward with us, so...
we waved goodbye to each other
from behind this really thick glass,
as they, like, locked the doors behind me.
They showed me and my son to our room
and I remember thinking it was quite nice.
It was clean, it was quiet,
I could see the trees through the window.
And then another woman came into the room
and she ordered me to open my bags
and she, like,
snapped on these latex gloves,
and she started
going through my belongings,
holding things up and saying,
"What's this?"
They took away my cables
my dressing gown belt
any plastic bags I had
and my scissors,
my tweezers and my razors.
Anything that I might use to harm myself
or my baby was confiscated.
[Nurse]
You asked for this?
[Resonance fades]
Are you gonna watch?
'Fraid so.
That's why there's so many
fuzzy legged women around here.
[Elizabeth] And then
they left me in a room
alone with my baby.
And I freaked out because by this point
my greatest fear
was to be left alone in a room
with my son.
The reason mother and baby units
encourage their patients
to have their child
stay with them on the ward
is so that they can bond
while the mother is being treated.
This greatly increases
their chance of recovery
which is wonderful.
Unfortunately,
most of the patients on those wards
are having very negative thoughts
and feelings about their babies,
so most women do freak out at this point,
the way I did.
[Woman]
There's been some kind of mistake.
[Soft, pensive music]
I'm not supposed to be in here.
After that, a member of staff
sat at the door to my room
which was was wide open, by the way,
and they watched me.
Every 15 minutes
someone would look through your door
and write down whatever you were doing,
24 hours a day.
So in the middle of the night, you'd have
this bright light shining on you.
And they'd be like,
"What's she doing? Oh, she's sleeping."
Someone I'd never met before
watching me wash, eat, talk on the phone.
Hi, my name is Sawyer Valentini.
I am at
Hyland Creek Behavioural Health Facility.
I am being held here against my will.
Please send help.
Do you know how many calls
the cops get like that every week?
[Music fades]
Those are from crazy people.
They watched it all
and they wrote it all down.
I immediately felt like I'd made a mistake
- and tried to bargain my way out.
- [Tense music]
I told them I didn't need to be there
that actually going home
would be the best thing for me
that I wasn't really that ill.
They told me I was wrong,
that I definitely needed to be there
and that if I tried to leave
they would section me
under the Mental Health Act,
meaning I would be detained
against my will.
My rights stripped away.
- The reality of my situation hit me then.
- [Music builds]
In only a month I had become
so unwell that I was now trapped
on a locked ward, trying to convince
a stranger that I wasn't mad.
When I knew in my heart that I was mad.
And for the first time I thought,
"I might never get out of here."
- I felt like a prisoner.
- [Music fades]
We couldn't go into each other's rooms
or touch each other's babies
when we were finally allowed outside
we weren't allowed
to meet up with another patient.
We were given our pills
in one of those little paper cups.
And I remember thinking,
"Oh, this is like
those little paper cups in films."
[Tense, percussive music]
And then I met the other patients.
They had wild eyes,
stained clothing,
they shuffled around in their slippers.
Some of them were crying,
others glared, angry,
but most of them just looked
scared and lost.
Now I was surrounded by witches.
They looked in at me through the window.
They whispered
to each other outside my room.
They swayed in the shadows, waiting.
- At dinnertime, I sat down at a table
- [Music fades]
and a woman I'd never seen before came
and sat down next to me.
Hi, I'm Emily.
[Elizabeth] We were soon joined
by another woman.
Hi, I'm Jude.
[Elizabeth] I felt an immediate connection
to Emily and Jude
as they told me their stories.
I had had months of...
feeling...
progressively worse.
There was one specific day
I'd asked my friend,
who is an A&E nurse, actually,
to meet me in the park.
And I, I just said to her
"I don't recognise myself.
"I looked in the mirror
and I don't recognise who I am."
She said,
"I'm going to take you home now.
"And I really think we need
to step this up
"because if someone presented to me
in A&E like this
"I would immediately
call the psychiatric team."
[Elizabeth] What do you mean
you didn't recognise yourself?
I looked in the mirror and I was...
It wasn't me anymore.
I saw a person
but I felt so disconnected to that person.
I was... I was terrified.
[Elizabeth] And Emily,
what was happening with you?
I think pretty much
as soon as my son was born
I sort of stopped sleeping.
And progressively that became
more and more sort of horrific.
[Soft whispering, uneasy breathing]
This building feeling
of wanting to escape.
[Disturbing, ghostly voice] There's
someone in the house!
[Elizabeth] What sort of things
were you planning?
How were you gonna escape?
Maybe I could, like
get a train several hours away
and hide in a hotel and not tell anyone.
Really, really weird.
And then I guess...
also that became
a bit more desperate and darker.
And actually, how can I just,
just literally escape.
[Elizabeth] Talking to Emily
and Jude did help
but it wasn't enough.
I needed to talk to people
who had suffered
from these illnesses and recovered.
A friend gave me
the phone numbers of two women
and from my room on the ward
I called them.
Hi, my name is Krystal.
I'm an Associate Professor
at Manchester Metropolitan University.
And I'm also a mum myself to
a little four year old boy called William.
Hi, I'm Lucy. Lucy Warwick-Guasp.
Um, and I am one of two mums
to a wonderful daughter
who will be nine in a couple of weeks.
[Elizabeth] Krystal and Lucy had been
on different wards
a couple of years before me.
Both of them were now doing well
and had used their experiences
in their work
to help other women
who found themselves in a similar place.
Another person I spoke to was Sophia,
who has never been
in a Mother and Baby Unit
but has had experience
of postpartum depression and anxiety.
She reached out to me
when she heard I was in the ward
- [No audible dialogue]
- and was so kind and understanding.
I felt very close to her.
I'm Sophia Di Martino, and I'm an actor.
- [Elizabeth] And do you have children?
- Yeah. Two.
[Elizabeth] I asked these women
to tell me about their experiences,
hoping I could use their stories
of recovery as a kind of spellbook
to help me find a way through the storm.
[Elizabeth] So can you just tell me,
how did your feelings
of anxiety and depression,
how did they first manifest?
I was really loved up at the beginning.
After giving birth,
until my husband went back to work.
And when it was just me
responsible for the child
things just nosedived really,
really quickly.
I experienced a very long labour,
so I was left
quite traumatised really after that.
And this then kind of continued.
And I do remember speaking to...
my GP quite early on, saying, you know,
crying a lot.
I was still probably in shock.
I think what she was trying to do
was ascertain whether
I was experiencing postpartum psychosis,
which I wasn't.
But then everything else
just kind of got missed.
Looking back,
it was post-natal depression and anxiety.
But it started off as, like,
a chronic insomnia.
I thought I was going to die.
I remember asking the midwife,
"How much no sleep
does it take to k*ll a person?
"Like can you die from having no sleep?."
And she was like, "No of course not.
"Of course you can't die
from having no sleep!"
But I think you actually probably can
because I felt my body...
like...
giving up.
I couldn't work anything out.
I couldn't work out...
I remember lining up
my glasses in the morning thinking
"If I put them there,
then I'll remember to put them on."
You know, everything becomes like
how do I navigate my home
with a... with a baby as well?
And I couldn't quite work it out.
I had this sort of heartbreak
when my second child was born
because I loved my baby so much, of course
but I realised that I-- Oh God,
That I couldn't...
be with my first child as much,
just me and him.
And I was just heartbroken.
The reality of being in the hospital,
away from him
for a few days
just, just broke my heart.
And I was just desperate
to not be on my own with him.
So I'd be driving to my friend's house
for a few hours just so
that I wouldn't be on my own
and thinking desperately
how I would fill each day.
But it just spiralled
and got worse and worse and worse
until I was admitted to
a Mother and Baby Unit.
The other women on the ward
were all fellow
sufferers of
perinatal mental health issues.
Some had been there for months already.
Some had even given birth
while they were staying on the ward.
Most of them had
anxiety and depression like me
but some women had psychosis.
[Eerie resonance]
[Eerie resonance fades]
This is Catherine Cho.
The author of
Inferno: A Memoir
of Motherhood and Madness
,
which details her experience
of postpartum psychosis.
Catherine wasn't on the ward
with me but she and her book
have helped me
to better understand these illnesses.
[Elizabeth] How is psychosis different to,
say, anxiety or depression?
So psychosis is a complete separation
from reality.
[Magical chiming;
Sing-song murmuring of children]
The wall between
what your brain is experiencing
and all the memories
and the subconscious is broken
and genuinely it felt like
everything I'd ever experienced,
read about or
known was being processed
at the same time.
[Elizabeth] What kind of things were
you seeing during that psychosis?
[Catherine] First it started with
seeing devils in my son's eyes.
That was the first indication
that something was wrong.
I started seeing demons.
I heard the voice of God talking to me.
I saw a lot of figures.
I felt them as well,
which is kind of terrifying.
You could feel people brush past you.
The food that was given to me
looked like flesh.
And I could see people preparing the flesh
and bringing it to me.
My husband's face wasn't his own.
I saw, you know, robots.
Basically a lot of just very vivid imagery
and continually, devils.
And demons.
The nurses looked like devils to me.
[Unsettling, instrumental music;
Grandfather clock tocks]
I could feel them kind of pulling at me,
tearing at me, even though
I know now that wasn't happening.
My husband took me to A&E
when he realised I was not well.
I thought we were in purgatory,
and I could see people
pushing microphones, lights and screens
and kind of laughing like,
this is really funny.
And I was trying to convince him
that we were on a film set,
that we were in purgatory
and we that needed to exit.
And he was just like, "Be quiet."
[Elizabeth] Can you tell me
about waking up in the psychiatric unit?
[Catherine] I woke up in a blank room,
a white room...
with no memory of what was going on.
I woke up alone.
This was after four days of psychosis.
And eventually, by the time
I'd been brought to the ward
I had stripped off my clothes
and urinated on the floor.
And they left me in there
to wake up after sedating me.
It felt like I was in a film,
that moment of, where am I?
What had happened?
There was nothing for me to do
except to get out of the bed,
put on some clothes and step outside,
which is what I did.
[Subtle unsettling resonance]
[Elizabeth] Catherine became unwell
during a trip to America
and didn't have access
to a specialist Mother and Baby Unit,
like I did.
Instead, she was separated from her son
and treated on a general adult ward.
[Catherine] So, most of the people
in the facility were homeless or veterans,
people who had drug abuse issues.
People who had fallen through the system,
essentially.
- [Eerie resonance fades]
- [Elizabeth] Before you became unwell,
what did you know about
postpartum psychosis?
I did know the very famous case in the US,
Andrea Yates.
But it wasn't until
I was recovering that I realised
we had the same diagnosis.
I didn't know that it was
postpartum psychosis.
[Elizabeth] Can you tell me a bit
about Andrea Yates?
Andrea Yates, this happened,
I think, in 2001.
She was a woman in Texas
and she drowned
her five children in a bathtub.
She was charged with m*rder and
they were looking for the death penalty.
But it was her husband
who really stepped in
and he said he didn't blame her
for what she had done.
But I think the general public
just didn't understand
and was genuinely horrified.
And she's still very much
a polarising figure, I think, in the US.
[Elizabeth] There are just two Mother
and Baby Units in the US.
In the UK we have 22,
which is in part due to the tragic death
of Dr Daksha Emson.
A brilliant psychiatrist
who lived only a few miles
from where I gave birth.
Well, my name's Dave Emson
and I was the... husband to Daksha
and the father to Freya.
[Elizabeth] So prior to becoming a mother,
Daksha had been diagnosed
with manic depression
and was on medication.
How did her pregnancy affect that?
So she had to be off her lithium,
her antidepressant, and her thyroxine.
And we were very lucky
'cause we conceived straight away
and then, miscarriage.
We got pregnant again straight away
and then another miscarriage.
And all this time
she's off her medication.
So it's almost like
that time b*mb is ticking away.
And in the end, you know,
the dream came true
and she was pregnant with Freya.
And then Freya was born.
I'm sure, all you--
All fathers will know,
especially with a first baby,
what a magical experience.
[Elizabeth] Daksha was keen
to breastfeed.
So the couple agreed,
along with her psychiatrist,
that she could stay off her medication
for a further three months.
We discussed her medication,
her signs, her illness
before she got pregnant,
during and afterwards on a daily basis.
But it was in that last week
that I realised
it was three months
that she's been breastfeeding
and she's been off her medication
and had three miscarriages before that.
So I did mention to her that, you know,
it was probably time to go on medication.
She didn't want to.
[Elizabeth] Daksha was suffering
from postpartum psychosis
but no one around her knew.
She was scared that if she told anyone
then Freya would be taken away from her.
And she was afraid of being stigmatised
by her colleagues
if she told her psychiatrist the truth.
[Elizabeth] The day Daksha and Freya died,
Dave had been at work.
As I got to the front door
there was a very, very strong smell.
So I went to the kitchen,
Freya's pram was there
but she wasn't in her pram.
There was something on the table,
it was a...
an A4 piece of paper.
I picked up the note and...
I just read the first word.
And then...
I knew what that smell was.
[Elizabeth] The day before
Daksha k*lled herself and Freya
Dave had taken this photo of them.
[Soft, pensive piano music]
She was brilliant at hiding her feelings.
So the photograph that I took
big smiling face...
she'd already planned it.
[Ethereal vocalising joins]
[Elizabeth] The impact
of Daksha and Freya's legacy on cases
like mine cannot be understated.
Their story has been used internationally
to emphasise the importance
of perinatal mental health training.
[Music and vocalising conclude]
[Elizabeth] Why is it important
to you to talk about it?
I have to do this.
I cannot allow my girls
and other mums and babies
to die in vain.
You know, what happened to Daksha was
a complete and utter tragedy.
And sadly, you know,
I've been involved in looking at
the reports from her death
and from Freya's death
and sort of learning lessons from...
from her death and from Freya's death.
And actually, you know...
Gosh, I might get quite tearful but...
for her, um...
Sorry.
That really shocked
the medical world when it happened.
- [Soft, ambient music]
- That a doctor, a very gifted doctor
took her own life.
And it made it very clear
to people that organised services
that there is a difference between
the way psychosis presents
in the normal population
and how it presents
in the postnatal population.
The condition comes on faster.
Presentations can change within minutes
whereas in the general population
it could take weeks to months
to see the same changes.
It's considered a psychiatric emergency.
We don't have many of them.
As the years go on I sort of often think
what state of mind she must have been in
to have been so psychotic.
I don't know-- I have no idea
what was going on in her head.
And no one will know.
Her husband won't know.
Nobody will know.
But to have got to that point
of psychosis where
that was the exit route
whether it was for...
Through the psychosis,
she thought she was saving
herself and Freya, I don't know.
I don't know.
[Elizabeth] It has been over 20 years
since Daksha and Freya died.
But what happened
to them is still happening.
[Music concludes]
So in 2000,
one of the factors that shocked the UK
and more globally was the fact
that suicide was a leading cause of death
in the pregnancy period
and just afterwards.
And in November last year, 2022,
we had the latest triennial report.
And guess what?
Suicide is still a leading cause
of maternal deaths in the UK.
So nothing has changed.
In fact, the awful statistic
from last year is that
the rates of suicide
have actually gone up.
Even with the expansion of services,
there are gaps in women coming
through the door in the first place.
You've got all these women
who wouldn't even dare
tell their GP or their midwife
or their social worker
whoever it is, that they're suffering
because they're worried what might happen.
One of the most common things
that we get in our service is,
"Oh I was worried that if my GP
referred me to you
"that you'd take my baby away."
I can count on one hand
the number of women
who've had their children removed.
And I've treated thousands
and thousands of women.
There's a stigma around mental health
but the stigma around motherhood
is huge as well.
To say you're not a good mother
is probably the worst insult
a woman would ever hear in their life.
It cuts very deep.
So there's this idea
that being referred to somebody "like us"
or someone like me,
this internal idea of
"Am I a failure?"
"Am I not a good mum?"
And I think women struggle with that even
before they get through the door.
[Elizabeth] Do you ever feel guilty
as a mother?
I think I feel guilty
as a mother a lot of the time.
The moment you find out you're pregnant,
the guilt begins
and I don't think it ever stops.
There's so many pressures
and so many expectations.
Am I doing enough?
Have I given them enough time
or enough space?
Am I providing for them in all the ways
that I should be or could be?
Feel guilty about working.
Feel guilty about not working.
Feel guilty about
spending too much time with one child
and not the other child.
Feel guilty about not spending enough time
with your children.
Feel guilty about not spending enough time
on yourself.
And there's a lot of shame as well,
around...
being a mum and not...
People not wanting to show the messy bits.
And there's a lot of shame around
being ill after having a child.
There is a lot of shame around that.
[Elizabeth] Why do you think
you were scared,
or you didn't tell people
that you were going into the unit?
Well, it is, it's just all that judgement.
Didn't want people to think
badly of me
that I'd been a failure.
Yeah.
And I do remember
there was two other women,
who had babies that were
the same age as our daughter
and one of them
had friends visit and things
and I was like, "God that's brave."
I hid from my friends.
So I remember in the Mother and Baby Unit
my friends turned up
and they'd just come to see me
and I was like, "I can't see them",
because I just
didn't feel like me anymore.
What am I gonna say to them, you know?
When they're sat there, like...
I can't make small talk because
they've come to see
their friend and their friend's gone.
[Elizabeth] So that guilt and shame
that you felt, which I felt,
which seems to be almost universal
when it comes to motherhood.
Where do you think that comes from?
I don't know. I wish I knew because
I'd find it and I'd f*cking get rid of it.
I don't know.
It just must be a subconscious
societal thing that is drip fed into us
since being born.
I don't know, do you know?
[Elizabeth] Maybe women don't want
to talk about the dark thoughts
and feelings we have
because we don't want to be
the Wicked Witch.
- [Uneasy, drone-like hum]
- Or maybe it goes back even further
to the women who were accused as witches
hundreds of years ago.
The ones I read about in school,
the women whose names
went round and round my head.
[Hum fades;
Eerie, vocal resonance]
[Vocal resonance concludes]
Wow, this is heavy.
[Elizabeth] So these are testimonies
of women who confessed
to being witches
in the 15th and 16th century.
Wow.
- Okay, and just read them one by one?
- [Eerie resonance]
Okay.
Anna Moats confessed
within two hours of her arrest
saying the devil appeared
to her when she was alone
in her house,
cursing her husband and children.
Mary Scrutton confessed
that the devil appeared to her twice
once as a bear,
then again as a cat
and tempted Mary in a hollow voice
to k*ll her child.
Susannah Smith confessed
the day after her arrest
that eighteen years previously
the devil had appeared
to her in the form of a red dog
and tempted her to k*ll her children.
[Resonance increases]
Priscilla Collitt confessed
that the devil had appeared to her
when she was sick
some twelve years previously
and tempted her to k*ll
her children to escape poverty.
She placed one of her children
next to the fire to burn it.
Fortunately, another child pulled the baby
away from the fire.
[Elizabeth] So that to me sounds
like somebody developing a...
postpartum psychosis
or a severe depression,
but it certainly sounds
like somebody dipping into a psychosis.
[Elizabeth] Can you relate to
any of those testimonies?
I mean, I think the voices for sure,
the kind of voices and...
the idea that it is a devil.
Oh, the devil appears
all the time in psychosis. Yeah.
[Elizabeth] Where do you think
that comes from?
It's really interesting. I think it's...
something to do with
the way women start to think
in that postnatal period,
particularly when they're depressed
or they're developing a depression
and then a psychosis.
They bring in either
their own faith or their own religion
or I guess a more sort of global
interpretation of good and evil,
devils and angels.
[Soft, pensive music]
[Elizabeth] Those witch trials were
such a long time ago
and yet I can relate to
so much of what the women were saying.
It is chilling to realise
that if I'd been alive back then
I would have been considered evil
and I would have been k*lled.
[Soft, pensive ambient music increases]
In the 15th and 16th centuries
thousands of executions took place
usually by either hanging
or burning the accused at the stake.
The witch trials ripped through
communities with devastating effect.
In Europe and North America
around 50,000 women were k*lled.
In 1585, two German villages were left
with only one female inhabitant in each.
- [Music fades]
- I'm Professor Marion Gibson
and I work at Exeter University
where I'm professor
of Renaissance and Magical Studies.
[Elizabeth] And what is it
that you find interesting about witches?
I've always been interested in witches,
actually.
When I went to university,
they gave me
a kind of newspaper account of witches
of a witch trial in Elizabethan Essex.
And in it there were these voices of women
that I became fascinated by
because these are women
that we didn't normally hear from.
You know, they weren't in the literature
that I was reading.
They weren't in the history books.
They were ordinary women,
and they were talking about their lives.
And the way they were doing that
was framing it through
narratives of witchcraft
and I thought that was fascinating.
[Energetic, percussive music]
[Elizabeth] These atrocities
were playing out
against a backdrop
of normal, everyday life.
Women in their kitchens feeling
the devil's presence as they baked bread.
- The devil lives in domestic spaces
- [Music continues]
and he lives in ordinary foods
and he lives in ordinary objects.
And you can use those ordinary objects
to bewitch your neighbours.
And I think that's
one of the most frightening things
about the idea of the witch.
It's all so ordinary. It's all so mundane.
Anybody could be a witch.
Anything that crosses
your path in the course of your day
might be bewitched.
And the idea that your whole world
is threatening to you
your whole world
is full of witchcraft and the devil
I think is a very frightening thing
for people in this period.
[Elizabeth] Many of the women
accused as witches were people
who lived outside of the established norms
- who dared to rebel.
- [Music continues]
Even back then the witch was the
stereotypical opposite of the good mother
the good wife.
She was the woman
who was trying to act independently
of male control.
Witchcraft trials are
all about power and control.
They're about controlling women.
They're about
controlling people generally.
They're about telling you what to believe
and making you affirm that you believe it.
So they're a control mechanism.
[Music swells]
[Elizabeth] So a woman is accused
of being a witch.
What happens next?
They would have been questioned
by the magistrate
and then they would be put in a cart
and taken off to the nearest prison
and then they would have waited there
in the jail conditions,
which were horrible,
until the criminal court was convened.
And that could be months.
[Hypnotic, percussive music resumes]
And then they'd be brought into the court
in a public setting
where everybody was angry and chatting
and there's a kind of whirl of activity.
Questioned by the judge, very briefly
asked to say something
about their situation.
I know nothing of witchcraft.
Then judged by the jury.
Most trials took about ten minutes,
if that.
Which is astonishing, isn't it?
You have absolutely no time to think.
And then you're judged
and then you're taken away
and you could be hanged.
[Elizabeth] And how did they t*rture
the women?
- [Music concludes]
- t*rture was officially banned
against witches
or anybody else in England.
It was reserved for state crimes,
things like treason.
[Elizabeth] So those women,
whose testimonies I showed you,
they confessed without t*rture?
Yes, they do seem
to have confessed voluntarily.
And nobody's ever really
been able to explain that.
[Elizabeth] And would they have known
what would happen to them
if they confessed?
Would they have known
that they would die?
Yes, they would have seen it
in their communities.
So they did know.
I think there's good evidence
that they had quite a lot
of experience of what happened to witches.
Particularly when you get on to, say
the Matthew Hopkins trials in the 1640s,
you know,
by then witchcraft has been ill*gal
for 80 years.
There's 80 years of people
being hanged for this crime.
But nevertheless,
people carry on confessing,
which is very difficult
to explain unless you think there
are other factors involved.
One thing I would say from these questions
though is you know what I just read?
Like, the way I felt
if there wasn't something
where perinatal mental health was a thing
that I knew about
and I was in a Mother and Baby Unit--
I, I would have confessed to being a witch
if that was the social narrative that if
you think X, Y, and Z, you're a witch
I absolutely, I'd have confessed.
- I would have done it. Oh, sorry.
- [Elizabeth] That's alright.
Um, because you feel so...
You're desperate for an explanation.
I think that I would have gone for that.
[Elizabeth] Yeah. And would you have
also been happy dying as well?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I can fully relate
to that feeling of choosing
to be hanged versus carrying on
in a really terrible reality.
It was a form of t*rture.
To be a prisoner
in your mind is a form of t*rture.
It was not a way to live.
[Elizabeth] I would have
voluntarily confessed too.
[Soft, pensive music]
But it has been 400 years.
Why do women still feel like this?
Why are suicide rates increasing?
Why is there still so little awareness
knowledge, and support
around these illnesses?
If I'd been pregnant in that time
who would have treated me?
[Marion] You'd have gone
to your neighbour
because you knew
they'd had children before
and you'd say to them
"Could you maybe come
and look after me during my pregnancy?"
And then you would say to them,
"Can you act as a midwife as well?"
But basically it would be a neighbour,
it would be an elderly female neighbour
who had done all of this before.
[Elizabeth] Women used to be
the main healers.
We were doctors without degrees,
learning anecdotally
passing on our knowledge
to the next generation.
We were the first pharmacists
ab*rtion, nurses and counsellors.
We were midwives travelling
from home to home
and village to village.
Medicine is part of women's
heritage and history.
It was once our birthright
but then everything changed.
[Music concludes]
Did you know the entire witchcraft scare,
as far back as the 14th century,
was started by the medical profession?
That's right.
They were trying to get midwives out of
the child birthing business.
That's what they were.
Most of the women that they burned
midwives.
Is that true?
You better believe it.
Just another example of
male dominated professional society
exploiting females
for their own selfish purposes.
Men are such c*ck, aren't they?
[She sighs]
[Elizabeth] He's almost right.
But it wasn't just midwives.
It was any women
who treated their neighbours
who made medicines
who cared for others.
[Marion] One of the arguments
that's been put forward is that
witchcraft trials were
about driving out female healers.
While I don't think
that was a deliberate strategy
it does seem to me
to be an effect of what happens
if you're constantly
attacking and demonising people who say
they have healing skills
and dragging them away
and they're being ex*cuted as witches
it seems to me
that does leave a kind of gap
in the healing market.
And that was the gap
into which male medical workers stepped.
[Elizabeth] But the male doctors
of this period were using very little
of what we would recognise
today as science.
During training,
they rarely saw any patients
and no experimentation
of any kind was taught.
[Blood squelches]
Whereas the wise women, the witches,
were working in the field treating people,
developing an understanding
of bones and muscles, herbs and drugs.
When I became ill,
my only course of action
was to keep returning
to the emergency room
desperate for the help I wasn't receiving.
I wish that instead
I could have gone to the home
of the local witch
who had seen all of this before.
But those women were stolen from us
[Heavy drum beats thud]
taken from their homes.
[Crowd chatter]
Bring out Elizabeth Selwyn.
[Elizabeth] They were vilified,
derided, called crones and hags.
Witch!
Condemned for all eternity
to be dismissed as old wives
or spectres of doom.
To scare little children,
and warn women to never grow old,
to never behave badly.
[Roaring thunder]
Burn the witch!
[Crowd shouts angrily]
[Elizabeth] And the eradication
of their history as healers
still affects medicine.
Gender bias in medical knowledge
research and practice is deeply ingrained.
A study from 2022 showed
that women are often not taken
seriously, ignored, or deemed "emotional"
when it comes to their illnesses and pain.
An entirely natural expansion
of the pelvis.
You can fight it with ordinary aspirin.
I was afraid it might be
an ectopic pregnancy.
Ectopic?
I thought you weren't going
to read books, Rosemary.
It was staring at me in the drugstore.
And all it did was worry you.
Will you go home
and throw it away, please?
-
I will, I promise.
-
The pain will be gone in two days.
Ectopic pregnancy.
So I have a good friend,
Rageshri Dhairyawan,
who writes a lot about this.
We call it "testimonial injustice."
And that's when your truth
is not taken seriously.
You're not seen as
a reliable narrator of your own story.
And it classically happens to women,
and certainly women
who are racially minoritised are at
the greatest risk of not being believed.
It's right across the board.
So if you think about endometriosis
it's on average eight years
for a woman to be diagnosed
with endometriosis.
And during that time
she's likely to have sought help
again and again and again
and her symptoms
would have been dismissed.
Pain relief.
We know that Black women
are much less likely
to be given adequate analgesia
after medical procedures
because of the perception
that they have a higher pain threshold.
Me going in and saying numerous times,
"I'm struggling, I'm depressed
"I'm clinical and I'm telling you
"with my experience as a doctor
"that I've got severe postnatal
depression and anxiety
"and I need help."
For that to just be minimised.
We have known for years
that Black and Asian women
are more likely to die in childbirth
and we've done nothing about
it until relatively recently.
We still don't do enough about it.
That's a deliberate thing,
because we could solve that.
We managed to raise funds
to be able to find a vaccine
against COVID within 12 months.
So when there is political will
to address a situation, we address it.
There has been no political will
to address
ethnic disparities in health.
So my son arrived very early
and I also had an infection
but I was told, "Don't worry,"
and it would all go away.
But actually it didn't go away.
I, gradually, over the next 48 hours,
became more and more delirious.
I remember walking through the kitchen
and seeing loads of shiny knives
and having a thought back to Daksha Emson
thinking, "God, is that
what went through Daksha's mind?."
And I immediately was
so terrified by that thought.
So terrified.
Even though I wasn't in a dark space
at that point.
But I remember being so terrified
that I ran out of my kitchen
as quickly as I could.
I knew something was wrong with me,
but I didn't quite know what it was.
And then eventually,
I collapsed.
[Subtle unsettling hum]
[Elizabeth] At the hospital,
Trudi struggled to make
the other doctors understand
what was happening to her.
[Trudi] Because I said,
"You know, I'm a perinatal psychiatrist."
They didn't believe me. They thought
I was unwell, so they didn't believe me.
And then my husband had to say to them,
"No, it's true. No, she really is.
"She really is a perinatal psychiatrist.
That is exactly what she does."
[Elizabeth] Were you able to look
at yourself from the outside at any point?
Constantly.
Yeah... yeah.
In a way, I was being my own psychiatrist
[Trudi laughs]
looking at what all the causes might be
and what all the treatments might be.
But I could also see it
from all the thousands
of counts of stories
I've had from women over time.
[Elizabeth] And have you ever talked about
this in public before?
- No.
- [Hum stops]
I've never, ever, ever spoken about
this publicly before. No.
[Elizabeth] Why haven't you?
I think you have to be ready to tell
your own story, actually,
at the right time...
to the right people.
Even being a perinatal psychiatrist
it took me years to accept that
it had also been a full blown psychosis
or that it had dipped into a psychosis.
And that's stigma.
[Shema] I don't think I've been open
at work about the severity
of my mental health issues.
In fact, I don't think
anyone at work knows.
My entire career
has been focused on challenging stigma
around HIV in particular.
But then when it comes to mental health,
I still feel there's still an element
of shame within me about that.
Like somehow I failed.
My brain
or my mind,
wasn't strong enough to cope with this.
So this is my fault.
[Soft, pensive music]
[Elizabeth] Executing women as witches
was a way
of cleansing communities of women
who were mentally unwell
who didn't fit in
or who knew too much
and had too much power.
Their murders still reverberate
throughout our society.
Witch.
[Elizabeth] Women are scared
of being judged,
scared to talk about our dark thoughts,
our rage, our madness.
[Marion] I think the witch trials
do leave a tremendous legacy
of guilt and shame and silence.
The silencing of women's voices,
the silencing of women's experiences.
It may all seem a very long time ago
- [Music continues]
- but it is so persistent.
I've looked back at witch trials
over seven centuries.
And I can't help thinking
that we see the same thing
again and again and again.
And as a female historian
that really resonates with me.
I feel those emotions the same
as those women did in history.
And I think that's really powerful.
I think we should be telling this story.
The witch trials leave behind them
this tremendous legacy
of women feeling
they can't talk about things,
that happen to them,
of women feeling things are their fault,
of women feeling disempowered,
and that they are the enemy
somehow in society.
[Music continues]
The whole thing is just this enormous
ball of guilt and shame and misery
and difficulty and horror and anxiety,
isn't it?
"Oh, God, I'm wrong."
It's that, isn't it?
We all feel it.
- [Elizabeth] Hm.
- Yeah.
[Music builds]
[Ethereal vocal resonance]
[Resonance swells, subsides]
[Elizabeth] After a month on the ward
I gradually, magically,
did start to get better.
I spent more time with Emily and Jude
finding sisterhood and understanding
amidst the darkness.
We ate all our meals together.
We would sit at the doorways
to each other's room, chatting.
Before lights out in the evening
we'd slump on these sofas and
compare symptoms.
We became like a strange sort of family,
a coven.
Holding each other
when it all got too much.
My son and the other babies
became part of our coven too.
I spent my days just holding him.
And gradually I started taking him
out of the ward on my own.
I was no longer scared of him.
I began to understand him
and what he needed.
Then one day I was finally able
to close the door to my room
so that he and I were alone together.
I was so relieved that I could do it
that he was finally safe.
I was finally safe.
[Music concludes]
Being released from a psychiatric ward
is as weird as going into one.
They don't wait until you're 100% better.
Will you ever be 100% better?
Will any of us?
Anyway, they don't wait
until you are 100% better.
But instead they,
they wait until they know
that you can cope with being at home.
And it's very gradual.
So I started going home for the afternoon.
Uh, and then I would go home
for the whole day.
And then overnight.
After one of my overnights
Emily told me that she'd
heard a nurse saying
that they thought I would
be going home for good soon.
And I was really scared
because I didn't think I was ready.
The staff told me
to try going home for the weekend.
Oh fine, thanks.
Right over there.
My husband Jeremy came and picked us up
and he'd bought all my favourite food
and he was just trying so hard
to make it really nice and comfortable.
And I was really touched.
But I remember also...
feeling really scared,
that I wouldn't be able to do it
that I wouldn't be able to cope
and that I would let him down.
But then the next morning, I woke up
[Delicate, emotive music]
and everything was okay.
And I just remember crying with relief
because I knew that whatever happened
we'd got through this.
The darkness had lifted.
I think the time
when we couldn't stop laughing
that first time when we laughed like,
a proper belly laugh, crying laughing.
I was like, "Oh, I can feel, feel again.
"I don't feel like
I'm behind a glass wall."
Just getting a hug from another woman,
like a long hug.
Like you're a kid,
like you're a little girl.
Just having someone hug you and be like
"You're gonna be okay.
"You're gonna get through this,
and you're gonna be okay."
And just like, hold you.
Because you're doing all the holding
when you become a mother.
You're doing so much holding.
Having someone hold you and just...
I'm so lucky to have my mum
just do that for me.
[Elizabeth] In what ways
do you feel like your illness,
and that experience changed you?
It was absolutely my lowest I've ever been
and I've had some lows.
It's absolutely the lowest I've ever been
and I kind of climbed back from it.
So in a way I do feel
that nothing we face as a family
is probably ever going to be
as bad as what we went through.
Yeah, I think I am more grateful now,
for small things, and for my family,
and for moments.
And kind of, I feel so lucky
to have had the help
and to have got better
and had some amazing times with my family.
With my family.
Before I had kids, I always used to think
"Why would you have mum friends?
"I won't have mum friends.
I'll just keep my own friends.
"I don't need new friends,
oh, it'll be so boring."
And then I had children
and then I had a breakdown
and I really, really needed
that community.
I needed to be wrapped up
in the love and the care of other women.
It does feel like a coven, doesn't it?
This sort of collective wisdom,
knowledge, experience
sharing, support.
[Elizabeth] What would you say
to a woman who's watching this
who is maybe going through
a perinatal mental health crisis?
What advice would you give her?
Never, ever, ever struggle in silence.
There is always help for
every type of
perinatal mental health crisis
or psychological crisis.
Tell everybody around you.
Tell your partner, tell your family,
tell your friends.
But most importantly,
go and get professional help.
And no one's going to
take your baby away.
[Gloomy drone-like music]
[Elizabeth] I always wanted
to be a witch.
[Eerie vocal resonance]
- A good witch.
- [Resonance swells, subsides]
One who only used her power gently.
[Doorbell rings]
[Gloomy music continues,
Vocal resonance]
[Metallic ding]
But now I know
that good witches are prisoners, too.
They have to suppress their power.
You know I lighted it with a match, Wally.
From now on, I'm going to be
just a simple, helpful wife.
[Elizabeth] Or give it up.
[Music continues]]
They must stay young and beautiful.
They cannot stray from the path.
[Gloomy chimes]
I see now that their magic is meaningless.
Nothing more than a trick.
[Music halts]
[Footsteps approach]
Thank you.
[Elizabeth] I would much rather
be a bad witch.
[Music resumes]
My mental health is now stable
although I have been told
I should probably stay on medication
for the rest of my life.
I see the world in a different way now.
How fragile our minds are.
How easily our reality can be shattered.
I know now that not everything
is as it seems.
[Music fades to silence]
[Music resumes]
I've thought a lot about
how to talk to my son
about what happened to us.
About how he was pulled into my darkness
my madness,
my horror.
I don't want him to feel bad about that.
My son is two and a half now
and I'm completely obsessed with him.
He's my favourite person
in the whole world.
[Music concludes]
And while there are a lot of people
to thank for my recovery.
It was my son who saved my life.
- [Soft, emotive music]
- He gave me love
and focus, and a reason to keep going.
And he was there with me
every day on the ward.
I now treasure that one-on-one time
we had together.
[Music continues]
In your life, you too, will find
that your sense of reality shifts.
You will be pulled into worlds
that are so horrible
you cannot even begin to process them.
Rooms that make your knees weak.
[Music continues]
Madness and darkness,
horror and pain,
are always here waiting.
They will come for us all.
But then so will joy,
beauty,
love,
and magic.
Every woman is a witch
and every witch needs a coven.
Now, what do you want to ask me?
Alright. Thank you, can we cut?
[Dreamy synth-pop music]
[Music continues]
[Music fades]
Bertie, can you see the camera?
Where's the camera?
- Can you see the camera down there?
- Okay!
- Can you say hello?
- Can you wave to the camera?
- Can you wave hello?
- Hello.
- Hello.
- Hello.
Can you say thank you?
Thank you.
[Music resumes]
[Music continues]
[Music fades]
[Rhythmic, kinetic drum beats]
[Deep, hypnotic drum beats]
[Drum beats blend with percussive music]
[Percussion continues,
ethereal vocal resonance joins]
[Vocal resonance halts]
[Music concludes]
[Haunting, distorted music]
[Music fades]
[Soft, ethereal ambient music]
[Music continues]
[Music fades]
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Witches (2024)
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