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When you think of witches
is this what you see?
As a little girl, like so many little girls
I wanted to be
a witch.
On grey winter days I heard their songs in the woods.
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.
And I chanted my desires over and over again
trying to make something, anything, happen
in my quiet little world.
I read books about witches
I saw them on TV
but most of all I watched them at the cinema.
You girls watch out for those weirdos
We are the weirdos, mister.
I still remember seeing The Wizard Of Oz
for the first time.
From the moment Dorothy stepped into that technicolour land
I was spellbound.
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.
And we have the Wicked Witch of the West,
whose sickly green skin and evil demeanour
has become an indelible cultural image.
I'll get you, my pretty.
And your little dog too!
I wanted to be a good witch
I couldn't understand why any woman would choose to be bad.
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.
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.
It is in our culture, in all our stories.
Women are pitted against each other.
The virgin.
The whore.
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.
Slut.
What did you say?
You heard her.
She's not wearing a bra.
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 murdered 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.
Anna Moats.
Elizabeth Clarke.
Mary Scrutton.
Katherine Grady.
Mary Hicks.
Isabella Rigby.
Janet Horne.
Ruth Osborne.
Agnes Waterhouse.
Elizabeth Device.
Anne Whittle. Jane Bulcock. Susannah Smith.
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.
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
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.
I was happy.
I was safe.
But that was just an illusion.
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?
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.
Called me into the woods
inviting me to join them.
Until eventually
I did.
I've always been scared to be ugly and messy.
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.
Pregnancy is a strange time
at once mundane yet wildly magical.
And looking back I can see that this was when the madness
started crawling towards me.
As my body rapidly transformed
the edges of reality began to blur.
I no longer felt tied to the present
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!
But I didn't feel like that.
I felt out of control.
I was a storm
wild and unmoored.
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.
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.
What follows is my testimony.
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 these bright blue scrubs.
Dr Ben, he was called.
He started asking me a series of questions.
In the last week, how often have you been bothered
by feeling down, depressed or hopeless?
How often have you had little interest or pleasure
in doing things?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I was becoming increasingly suspicious
that mine wouldn't either.
As the sun came up
I went back to the emergency room.
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.
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
"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.
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 torture.
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
so I didn't dare tell anyone.
Not even the doctors.
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.
And she, like, calls her mum and sobs down the phone for a bit.
There he is!
And then in the next scene, she's like
buying shoes or something.
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.
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.
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 kill 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
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.
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.
That was terrifying.
I felt so alone.
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.
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? - Yeah.
And you joined this WhatsApp group
Motherly Love.
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.
They just, they got it, and they took me seriously.
And whatever fucked 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 torture.
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.
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.
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.
Partly because my husband was worried.
He was like, "You're going to 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?".
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.
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.
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.
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.
You asked for this?
Are you gonna watch?
'Fraid so.
That's why there's so many fuzzy legged women around here.
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.
There's been some kind of mistake.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 and a woman
I'd never seen before came and sat down next to me.
Hi, I'm Emily.
We were soon joined by another woman.
Hi, I'm Jude.
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".
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.
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.
This building feeling of wanting to escape.
What sort of things were you planning?
How were you going to 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.
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.
And I am one of two mums to a wonderful daughter
who will be nine in a couple of weeks.
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
and was so kind and understanding.
I felt very close to her.
I'm Sophia Di Martino, and I'm an actor.
And do you have children?
Yeah. Two.
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.
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 very long labour
so I was kind of 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,
"I'm crying a lot. I'm 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 kill 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.
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.
How is psychosis different to, say, anxiety or depression?
So psychosis is a complete separation from reality.
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.
What kind of things were you seeing during that psychosis?
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.
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".
Can you tell me about waking up in the psychiatric unit?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 murder
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 horrified.
And she's still very much a polarising figure in the US.
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.
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 bomb is ticking away.
And in the end, you know, the dream came true
and she was pregnant with Freya.
And then Freya was born.
All fathers will know, especially with a first baby,
what a magical experience.
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.
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.
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...
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.
The day before Daksha killed herself and Freya
Dave had taken this photo of them.
She was brilliant at hiding her feelings.
So the photograph that I took
big smiling face...
she'd already planned it.
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.
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.
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.
It has been over 20 years since Daksha and Freya died.
But what happened to them is still happening.
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 death 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.
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.
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.
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 fucking 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?
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.
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.
Wow this is heavy.
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?
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 kill 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 kill her children.
Priscilla Collitt confessed that the devil had appeared
to her when she was sick some twelve years previously
and tempted her to kill 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 killed.
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 killed.
In 1585, two German villages were left
with only one female inhabitant in each.
I'm Professor Marion Gibson
and I work at Exeter University
where I'm professor of Renaissance and Magical Studies.
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. I thought that was fascinating.
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
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.
Many of the women accused as witches were people
who lived outside of the established norms
who dared to rebel.
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.
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.
And then they'd be brought into the court
in a public setting
where everybody was angry and shouting
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 10 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.
And how did they torture the women?
Torture was officially banned
against witches or anybody else in England.
It was reserved for state crimes, things like treason.
So those women, whose testimonies I showed you,
they confessed without torture?
Yes, they do seem to have confessed voluntarily.
And nobody's ever really been able to explain that.
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 illegal 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. - That's alright.
Because you feel so...
You're desperate for an explanation.
I think that I would have gone for that.
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 torture.
To be a prisoner in your mind is a form of torture.
It was not a way to live.
I would have voluntarily confessed too.
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?
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.
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
abortionists, 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.
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 cocksuckers, aren't they?
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.
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 executed 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.
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.
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
taken from their homes.
Bring out Elizabeth Selwyn.
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.
Burn the witch!
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.
At the hospital, Trudi struggled to make
the other doctors understand what was happening to her.
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".
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
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.
And have you ever talked about this in public before?
No.
I've never, ever, ever spoken about this publicly before. No.
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.
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.
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.
Women are scared of being judged,
scared to talk about our dark thoughts,
our rage, our madness.
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
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.
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.
- Hm. - Yeah.
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.
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.
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
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, like, 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.
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.
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.
I always wanted to be a witch.
A good witch.
One who only used her power gently.
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.
Or give it up.
They must stay young and beautiful.
They cannot stray from the path.
I see now that their magic is meaningless.
Nothing more than a trick.
Thank you.
I would much rather be a bad witch.
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.
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.
And while there are a lot of people to thank for my recovery...
It was my son who saved my life.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Can you say thank you?
Thank you.