Professor Green: “I wanted to cuddle little me”

EMMA - Hello, I'm Emma Tracey and this is Access All.

Later, Professor Green will be reminding men to get therapy before their mental health reaches crisis point. 

[Clip]

PROFESSOR GREEN - There's this kind of confusion, I think, around people, ADHD, autistic and empathy being broken or there being no feeling. I can be confused about what I feel and I can take more time to process things, but I feel a lot. 

[End of clip]

EMMA - We had a lovely long chat and it's coming up right after I speak to my emotional support, which is Beth Rose, BBC journalist. Hi!

BETH - Hi. Emma, so nice to be back in the studio again. 

EMMA - Nice to be chatting to you again. I'm in my cooking era at the moment, Bethany. 

BETH - I like to think that I would be, what do they call it? You watch it on social media and then you do all your batch cooking. 

EMMA - Yeah. 

BETH - All of that prep and stuff, it sounds great. And I'm like, yeah, definitely like next week for sure. And then Monday comes and there's a reason why I couldn't possibly start on Monday, which means that whole week is out, so I might as well buy my lunch. And then the next night I'll be scrolling again and I'm like, yeah, no, that looks like it would make so much sense. 

EMMA - The problem is, you know when you read a recipe and it gives a time that it takes to make something? I literally cannot impress upon you how much more time it takes me, like honestly, sometimes three times the length of time. And sometimes that's just like looking for stuff for about 20 minutes before I start. But it's also just... 

BETH - Do you not have everything like your spice rack or your whatever else you need, utensil rack? 

EMMA - I had it all labelled. I spent about 3 hours doing it with my special pen friend blindy gadget with barcodes.

BETH – That sounds good.

EMMA - It's a recorder where you put the barcode sticker on and then you record the thing and then you rub the pen over it again and it'll read out the thing and I had it all labelled up and then I lost the pen friend and now they're all there with their unreadable labels on. 

BETH - How long ago did you lose the pen? 

EMMA - A week ago, it'll probably turn up somewhere. I've probably just like put it in the cup drawer or the fridge. 

BETH - Was this the implement that like saved your bacon in the kitchen every day? 

EMMA - It was helpful. No, I mean, I'm not going to lie here. I spent three hours doing it and then I spent two weeks not using the spices and then when I went to use the spices, I couldn't find the pen friend. 

BETH - I think spices are overrated anyway. You just use the same old ones, right? Bit of paprika. That's probably about it in my household. 

EMMA – Well it's only salt and pepper and mine at the moment.

MUSIC – Theme Music

EMMA - Thank you for pressing play on the Access All podcast. I am delighted to have you with me to discuss all the recent happenings around disability, mental health and neurodivergence.

You can subscribe to us on BBC Sounds and if you're outside the UK, it's wherever you get your podcasts from. And that means that Access All will download onto your device every single month without you having to do another thing.

Now, I love to hear from you, you know this. Please do email me about anything at all, accessall@bbc.co.uk.

Up to one in nine women experience obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms during pregnancy or the first year of their baby's life. Actress Kimberley Nixon was one of them. She's written a book. I'll talk to her later and we'll chat to a clinical expert about this as well.

Just to say that during this episode, the topic of suicide does come up a couple of times.

As all the good pod hosts say, let's dive in.

My guest coming up is English rapper Professor Green, and his real name is Stephen Manderson. And even if you're not particularly a rap fan, you probably will recognise some of his songs. Take a listen. 

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He's collaborated with people like Lily Allen and Emily Sande. He's a real superstar. I do love my job, guys. And he's in to talk to me about some new research from the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists, which says that 7 in 10 men don't reach for therapy until they're at crisis point.

Stephen's always been extremely open about his own story and about his mental health story as well. And there's no difference here. It's a great chat, loads of lovely insight. And he's recently had ADHD diagnosis and an autism diagnosis as well. And that just brings a whole new element to the conversation. What a great guy. And listen out to later in the conversation where he gets distracted by something in his garden. Here's Professor Green. 

PROFESSOR GREEN - Morning, how are you doing? 

EMMA - I'm very well, thank you. Men's mental health in particular is really important to you. Why is that? 

PROFESSOR GREEN - I guess primarily and selfishly, despite all the negative connotations attached to being selfish, because I am a man and I care about my mental health.

I mean, mental health wasn't even a phrase I heard growing up. You know, it was just a term that was used to call someone crazy, right? It was just mental. It was the first half.

And then my dad took his own life when I was 24. And all of a sudden, things became, more apparent than they were. And I started to think about things a little bit more. And my own mental health took me a long time even after that to access any help or support or to even understand that there was any out there. 

EMMA - And new research says at 7 in 10, men don't look for support until they are really, really in crisis. Why do you think that is? And you were similar, I think. So why was it? Why did it happen like that for you as well? 

PROFESSOR GREEN - I mean, that's really telling of just how affected we are by this whole man up thing, I think. Like the idea of being a man is being able to tolerate things and handle things, despite us never really being given the tools to sit with our feelings. 

It's taken for me to have a kid to realise that I've got to behave in a way I'd like him to model versus just using verbal cues and the whole do as I say, don't do as I do thing. For me to really understand the importance of being able to have a relationship with myself, like a healthy relationship with myself and my feelings and being able to sit with them versus act them out. 

I'm doing it at 42, he's now 5. And already he's able to name his feelings, to sit with things, you know, it doesn't always catch him because he's a five-year-old and I couldn't name an emotion when I was his age and I had all of the feelings. You know one of the only ways I could really authentically connect to the child that I was is with that knot in my stomach when I get it. I still remember that and I still get it sometimes, not to the extent I used to. 

EMMA - What was the moment, the point, the person who helped you, encouraged you to start working on your mental health and seeking formal help. 

PROFESSOR GREEN - There's been different people throughout my life. When I was really young, I saw a psychiatrist because in the nature of my childhood, my mum and dad weren't around. I was brought up by my grandmother. There were social workers, all sorts of stuff. But that began and ended quite early on in my life. And nothing was diagnosed then.

And when I started making records, I thought everything would be good as gold. I thought I'd just be absolved of all my past issues. And it turned out that I wasn't. And then I had the guilt of feeling somewhat ungrateful because I had that thing that I wanted. And now other people saw me as having that thing that they want. And so therefore everything should be all right. So how dare I complain?

And so there was a lot of internal conflict and I wasn't speaking out loud about it because I didn't feel like I could. And days were still good and days were still bad. And nothing changes that. I don't think there's any amount of success. There's obviously stresses that you're that can be helped by way of, a level of financial success or security. But your internal experience, which is basically what life is, we externalize all the things we feel and whatever else, but ultimately it's an internal experience. And that doesn't necessarily change or improve. And in my instance, everything was kind of put under a microscope. And I started to ruminate way more and I was becoming really hyper-fixated on worrying about what was to come. 

EMMA – But you know, yeah, you know a bit more about the hyper-fixation now and a bit more insight into that.

PROFESSOR GREEN - I had no idea. So all the things that I was diagnosed with throughout my life, generalised anxiety disorder, depression, OCD, you know, it... and OCD for me was largely intrusion of thought, cyclical thought, rumination, really negative thought cycles that I woke up with. 

EMMA - So rumination, like really thinking, thinking, thinking on the same thing for a lot of time. 

PROFESSOR GREEN - Yeah, and it was always worst case scenario. And I'd never heard the line, not everything you think is true at that point.

Friends, family, people in my work life that suggested I should get help at various different points.

And most recently, it was through a therapist that both me and my partner were seeing. Not everything in my life was great, and I wasn't coping. And the things I was doing to cope, to escape decisions I was making, was leading me to substance misuse and isolation, which is dangerous.

I say this, and I say it kind of jokingly, but a lot of truth is said in jest, and like 40 years of being me nearly killed me. I was at crisis point. And I ran to a psychiatrist. And he suggested I have ADHD assessment, which I did. That came back as a tick in both sides of it, hyperactivity and inattentiveness. And he suggested I have further assessment for autism, which also came back a tick. And I felt really ignorant when I received both diagnosis because they're not mental health conditions. I didn't know anything about them. I didn't know what they really were or meant or that they could have been impacting my life.

And so everything that I was diagnosed with up until that point was actually secondary to the very things that were at the crux, at the root of everything else that I'd gone through and suffered. 

EMMA - Are they linked, do you think, all of those things? 

PROFESSOR GREEN - I think, well they are, by way of my brain, absolutely. But I don't, you know, the work never stops. I don't think we should ever stop being works in progress because if we stop learning, we kind of stop living. 

There's also a part of me that as much as I can understand things and behaviours and patterns, by way of understanding those two differences a bit more. I'm also a person, and that's just my experience of life. So it's how I navigate the world, understanding what I now do about those two things and how they impact my decision making, my motivation, my thought processes. It's really dangerous when people other than the person diagnosed start using the diagnosis to say, oh, that's because of that, or, oh, you're doing that again, and that's because of this. Actually, your diagnosis is for yourself. It's not for anyone else. It's to aid you in how you navigate the world. 

EMMA - What has that helped you to put in place strategies or things to do? 

PROFESSOR GREEN - Do you know what? It's helped in some respects, but I'm still myself. And so consistency is my biggest problem. So when I say sleep is the most important thing, it really is. And to have prioritised that, to have prioritised sobriety, to have prioritised movement and exercise, all of those things help so much. There's quite a lot that I have to do in my day in order to maintain some sort of equilibrium. It's not normal to ice bath, right? It's not the most pleasurable thing, but it's very, very helpful for me.

But then, you know, life comes along and something gets in the way. You get an injury or there's a life stress or there's work stress or there's everything all at once, which is generally what seems to happen in my life. And then I'm knocked off. I'll get a bad night's sleep, so I won't exercise the next day and then I won't eat as well. And that can quite quickly take me off track. So to answer your question, it's helped me understand what I need to implement, but I'm still in a place where I'm battling to implement those things consistently and throughout, irrespective of life's challenges. And I guess that's where the mastery will come into it when I get to that point, which I hopefully will. 

EMMA - How has it informed how you do things, do you think? 

PROFESSOR GREEN - I've always, so when I was a kid, I wasn't brilliant, but I was considered bright and that became the focus versus me not being able to get to school. 

EMMA - Yeah, we hear so much from kids now not being able to get to school. 

PROFESSOR GREEN - I couldn't put my uniform on. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me every single day. I used to count a lot, especially words when people were talking. I had a tic. I was wet until I was 12. And you know, when I saw that on the assessment, I was like, good God, I've never discussed this, this is scary. You know, how is that relative? But it is.

The fact that if I ever did get to school, I was capable and potentially ahead in some aspects. That was the focus. It was never everything around it. And I went to three primary schools. I went to two secondaries, a pupil referral unit. I was the only person in the pupil referral unit that wanted to do work because I was only there because of my absence from school. It was never anything behavioural at school. And then tried to sit my GCSEs twice over in college but couldn't. I never knew what was going on then. I never knew how much I struggled with the social aspect of it. I never understood the periodic burnouts, the physical manifestations of something psychological, the stress around it that impacted me, the constant stomach aches, you know, that feeling of just the rigidity, the... horrible feeling of anxiety and I never knew what it was owing to. 

EMMA - What would you say to young people now, autistic or have ADHD, who are really struggling through their education? 

PROFESSOR GREEN - For me, I found comfort in music. I was really lucky. I put my headphones on and I turned music up louder than would probably be comfortable for most people. And it was louder than everything else. You know, I love cinema probably equally, but it's a place where I can go and my headphones was that place for me as well, where I can go and I can be authentic, I can be happy, I can be sad, I can facilitate whatever I'm feeling. And I'm not someone who wants to play happy. I don't want to play happy songs when I'm sad. I want to facilitate the sadness, I want to feel the sadness, I want to get it up and I want to get it out. And I love sad songs. I love feeling. I feel a lot, right? There's this kind of confusion, I think, around people, ADHD, autistic and empathy being broken or there being no feeling. I can be confused about what I feel and I can take more time to process things, but I feel a lot. And I'm happiest when I can feel those things. And that's the scariest part. I think you can't go and do that everywhere. 

So finding places where you can express, where you can feel and you can be authentic is the most important. So lean into whatever allows you to feel what you're feeling and be okay with it would be my advice. 

EMMA - Your newest songs, is there any sort of Easter eggs, hat tips to the neurodivergent community?

PROFESSOR GREEN - I've always written about what I think, I feel or I observe. And I'd say that's probably owing to how I view the world and how I process things. And music's been a way of helping me process. And there's definitely an Easter egg in the song. I mean, the song is basically about, without my realising, it just kind of came out. It's about my experience of autism. It's a song called All By Myself with an artist called Ren. It's not out yet. We sample Moby 'In This World' and Moby replayed all the parts and that's coming out this year. And I'm excited about it because that song was therapy for me.

I don't write, by the way. I don't write my lyrics. The last thing I do, which is always the hardest thing for me to do, is go back and, oh, there's a fox in my garden. Oh, he's running. He's gone over the fence.

EMMA - Cool. 

PROFESSOR GREEN - We've been feeding him. They got cubs, inner city foxes.

But Yeah, I just walk around waving my hands. I used to think they were, I used to think I just had rap hands and people used to take the mickey out, well, not the mickey, but they'd come up to me and go, Pro Green, Pro Green, swear down. And I was like, oh God, I feel like a caricature of myself whenever I gesticulate. But through the autism assessment, I learned that that's because I'm a visual thinker. And I thought because I was using words that it wasn't visual, but because I place things and I pull from when I need them, it is visual.

When I had my autism assessment, the psychiatrist laid out, I don't know, 6, 8 cards, and they were picture cards that told a story. They were monkeys climbing a tree to get coconuts, and the coconut fell and hit one of the monkeys on the head. And she asked me to tell a story with the cards laid out in front of me. So I did. There was not much detail to it it was quite quick and quite succinct. And she took the cards away and asked me to tell the story again. And I'm telling her the story. I'm doing this as I'm doing it. And it's way more detailed without me realising. 

EMMA - So what are you doing for audio podcast listeners?

PROFESSOR GREEN – Oh right, sorry, so like pointing to where the cards were and using where the cards were in much greater detail than when the cards were there to tell the story. And she went, do you realize what you just did, no, she went with your hands. No, she went, you pointed to everything that was on the cards and told the story by way of where you remembered things were, you're a very visual thinker. That's not verbatim, but it was something like that. And I was like, Oh my God, my rap hands!.

EMMA – Love that.

PROFESSOR GREEN - She was like, "What?" I was like, "Well, I do this thing where..." Because when the reason I was considered at all bright when I was a kid was mental arithmetic and I could take sums apart and not use a calculator to do some. It was silly stuff, but it was ahead of where they, a child would have been presumed to be. And then that kind of translated into how I would battle rap, because I would look at someone and I wouldn't know how it was going to rhyme, but I would know what I was going to take the mickey out of, or I would have something that rhymed that I wanted to tie into and I'd have it over, sounds silly, but I'd have it over here, I'm pointing up into the right for people just listening, and then I have something else over here. And when the time come, I would kind of reach for it mentally. I can't explain it better than that, it's weird, but it's how I think. 

EMMA - What a nice thing to find out about yourself and to understand better. And you know, I feel like there is a bit of joy in it for you, figuring all this out. 

PROFESSOR GREEN - There is. There is.

I think that most of the sadness comes from that immediate, oh my God, the life I could have lived. To read on my diagnosis that, and not to say that it would have been easy to access the support because it's not, so I wouldn't necessarily have got it, but that I was deemed to have needed support throughout my childhood. That made me feel, you know, it was quite, you know, I wanted to cuddle with little me.

EMMA – Yeah.

PROFESSOR GREEN - Because it was support that I didn't have, but I think with that as well, I've found my way through. And I'm fortunate because I'm still here, just. It's been quite difficult at times, but there's got to be some strength that's come from it as well. As exhausting as it's been, as exhausting as it's been, there has to be some strength to have come from finding my own way. 

EMMA - Professor Green, Stephen Anderson, thank you so much. This has been lovely.

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EMMA - Beth Rose, BBC journalist, is with me once again. Hello. 

BETH - Hello. I'm still here, Emma, for you. 

EMMA - Great. And this is the bit of the show where we go through some of the news. And Northern Ireland is the first part of the UK to bring in a new law called the Sign Language Bill Northern Ireland 2025. And the law says that the government must offer free BSL or ISL, that's British Sign Language or Irish Sign Language, classes to deaf people under 25, plus their families, guardians or carers. That sounds like a law that's come from quite a lot of serious campaigning, Beth, does it. 

BETH - It has. It's such a good news story. But you know what was really interesting is when we were talking about this, it's the surprise and the shock that people had that this isn't just available for people. But in England, Scotland and Wales, if you are a hearing parent and you have a deaf child and you want to be able to learn to communicate, you currently have to fund most of those lessons. 

So you might get a bit of funding from your local authority or some support from charities to learn BSL Level 1 and then you might progress. Ideally you would learn BSL Level 3 as a parent because when I tell you what BSL Level 1 is, it's kind of toddler speak. So fingerspelling, really basic words and sentence structures. A four-year-old who can communicate with BSL is beyond Level 1. And someone actually explained it to me that it's a bit like when we learned French or German GCSE for like a couple of months, i.e. there's not much content in there. So that's Level 1. Parents should ideally be Level 3, which is much more advanced, comprehensive. But if you pay for classes Level 1, 2, and 3, we're talking £5,000, which is a huge amount of money. So many families just, just can't afford that. And that's talking about communicating with your own child.

EMMA - And that's one person's classes costing five grand. You know if it's a family of 5, I've heard of situations where the mum will learn and then will go home and teach the rest of the family, but not everybody can do that. 

BETH - Exactly. And it's like time pressure. It's a really complicated thing to learn. But hopefully this is a good news story. Northern Ireland are trailblazing and hopefully the rest of the nations will follow. 

EMMA - Now, have you forked out to speak to your own children through BSL? Let us know. You can email accessall@bbc.co.uk.

Now, last time we spoke about Motability and all the changes that are happening there. Some of them are every driver of a Motability vehicle who is under 30 will be fitted with a black box, which kind of monitors your speed, etc. Mileage caps have gone down from 20,000 miles per year to 10,000 miles per year and excess mileage, so mileage driven over that amount, is now 25p a mile instead of 5p a mile as it was before. Lots of you have been talking amongst yourselves about this, but you've also been writing to us. And one person who did just that was Barney, wasn't it, Beth? 

BETH - It was. So Barney got in touch and he says he's new to the world of disability. He's a dad of three and his youngest has a rare muscular condition. He said the whole family was looking forward to their first Motability vehicle and then these changes happened. So they live in a rural area and they have a load of hospital appointments to get to. And he says that annual mileage at the moment is 20,000 plus. So Barney said for our family, this means an additional cost of £7,500 across the three years, which is likely to make the scheme unaffordable. So Barney said, he'd heard about exceptions to this and did we know what they were?

Now we've gone back to Motability and they said they are being worked on right now and they will be announced by the 1st of July, which is when this cap comes in. It's worth saying, actually, and Motability did remind us of this, that 73% of their customers, of which there are just under a million, they drive 10,000 miles or fewer per year. And they also said, hey, look, the government put VAT on some advanced payments in the last budget, and they added a 12% premium on insurance premiums, which means we need to find another 300 million pounds a year. They said either they could make everyone pay an extra 1000 pounds a year for their Motability vehicles, or they could make these changes. 

EMMA - And that's what Nigel from the Motability Foundation, the charity arm, said to us last time. He said they want it to be fair for all. They want everybody to be able to be insured. 

BETH - But I'm just going to add also, Barney, he wrote us a lovely email and he said he described us as a wonderful, informative and inclusive podcast. And I cannot tell you, Barney, how happy that made us. 

EMMA - Made our week!

You might also remember on the last episode, I spoke quite passionately about the disability tax. It covers kind of the extra time it takes disabled people to do things, the extra energy. And we had some emails about that too. Dawn got in touch and she said that she's in her 60s and she's got dyslexia. But recently she had to deal with some official documents, which for someone who's dyslexic can be quite difficult and they needed the utmost accuracy. And she says she's been using AI to great effect. Now, I do love an AI story, good or bad. So Beth, tell me a bit more. 

BETH - Dawn emailed us and she said, AI has been great, not because it writes for me, it doesn't, but because it helps me organise my thoughts, structure my arguments, and communicate with a clarity and precision I have always had inside my head, but struggle to get onto the page. I mean, how fantastic is that? And Dawn does say, she wonders how many other people are using it to their benefit and how. And I, I have used it to my benefit, Emma. 

EMMA - In a disability way. 

BETH - Not in a disability way. In an everyday way, am I allowed to share it? 

EMMA - Oh, yes, please. 

BETH - So it was actually a couple of years ago, so I feel like maybe I was being a trailblazer then. But I was going on holiday to India with a friend. We had big ideas, not much time, and a lot of locations and transport ways to get around. We just couldn't figure it out ourselves. So we used one of the common AI machines, things, put it all in, and within two seconds we had an itinerary. We obviously double checked and we ran our holiday by it and it was fantastic. 

EMMA - That is really, really good. And actually, every time I give AI a main prompt, I will say, I'm blind, help me choose an outfit for. And what's interesting, because I use it quite a lot to match up my clothes. I use it to check my makeup as well. In some ways, it's a really good thing to tell it I'm blind because it'll give me more detail, but sometimes it will dumb things down for me and it will make it a bit too easy. I put in a travel plan once and I said, I'm blind, help me get from X to Y. And they said, oh, if you're blind in this situation, it might just be easier to get a taxi. 

BETH – Oh no, that's so sad. It should be telling me much more exciting things. 

EMMA - No, I do use it and I do find it really, really good. But I did find that highly amusing and that is because AI is based, it takes all the stuff off the internet. And all the stuff on the internet or most of it was put there by non-disabled people. So it has its own sort of preconceptions and its own kind of inability. It's ableist, basically. It's ableist as the rest of the world.

So, you know, but please do tell me, listeners, what are you using AI for? How wrong has it got it? Because it can be very confidently wrong, as I have found out. Email me, accessall@bbc.co.uk.

Can I just give a little shout out to Steve Newton who sent us the most lovely email. Not going to go into what he said, but honestly, Steve, we appreciated it so, so much. 

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Actress Kimberley Nixon has been in some of the UK's best loved shows, from historical drama Cranford to comedy Fresh Meat, and that interestingly named 2008 movie Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging. She stepped away from it for a while to have a baby and then her life was turned upside down by perinatal obsessive-compulsive disorder, perinatal OCD.

It actually can occur in up to 17% of women in early pregnancy or within the first year of their baby's life. But I'm not sure that many of us are particularly familiar with the condition. Well, now Kimberley has written a book, She Seems Fine to Me, which digs deep into that part of her life and is brutally honest, I would say, in the best way. And Kimberley is with me now. Hi, Kim. 

KIMBERLEY - Hello, thank you so much for having me. 

EMMA - Oh, thank you for being here.

And just to say that after I've spoken to Kimberley, we will be getting a look at the clinical side of all this with expert Dr. Camilla Rosan.

Kimberley, what is perinatal OCD? 

KIMBERLEY - Perinatal OCD is experiencing distressing and unwanted intrusive thoughts, feelings, urges, usually around harm coming to your baby or that you may be a possible harm to your baby and doing compulsions in order to stop those things from coming true. And so you live in a vicious, a vicious circle that never ends so that you can keep your baby safe. 

EMMA - Now, Kim, it's quite a book. Tell me a little bit about it and why you decided to write it. 

KIMBERLEY - I'd made a promise to myself when I was very unwell that if I ever made it through to the other side, I wanted to be that voice that I so desperately needed to hear when I needed it. So when I was Googling things at the time, so four or five years ago, just nothing was coming up, and I hope that now if you Google some of those symptoms, stuff will come up. 

EMMA - Your name is all over the internet about this. You are that voice that has definitely come through for sure. Let's go back to that time five years ago. What were the first signs, let's say, that something wasn't quite right. 

KIMBERLEY - I think immediately, the moment he was out, they held up my son to me and I remember thinking, oh my goodness, like that's my baby. We'd done IVF and we'd been trying for years, and I say that it feels like someone flipped a switch and everything just went very dark. In the book, I say that it was like the upside down in Stranger Things. Everything kind of looked the same but felt off to a degree. 

EMMA - So what started going wrong? 

KIMBERLEY - I couldn't quite trust that he was going to stick around. I kept thinking that something was going to take him away from me. Whether that would be that he would become ill and he would die or the authorities would take him away, or we'd get separated somehow, or he'd get kidnapped from the hospital, all of these. I mean, I say wild things, but actually the problem with OCD is that it can start completely rooted in reality.

I mean, over 95% of new parents will have intrusive thoughts because suddenly, like you say, you've got this tiny defenceless human, you might never have looked after a baby before. And my husband had all of those things, you know, but he was just able to sort of shrug them off or pushed through them when he became more confident in being a parent. But it never lifted for me. I would ruminate and circle and round and around and around. And I just took protective measures to checking for cameras. I had to get to him within 10 seconds when he cried. So it started with things like that and it just spiralled and spiralled and spiralled. 

EMMA - Did you say you were looking for cameras? 

KIMBERLEY - What are the worst things that can happen to your baby, them being kidnapped or sold on the dark web? I mean, I don't even know about half this stuff, but I would just check that no one had put cameras trying to get footage of my baby, or, as I say it now, I can hear how wild and ridiculous that sounds. But at the time, it's so real. 

EMMA - In the book, write very plainly about some of the more difficult thoughts, some of the thoughts with more of a stigma attached to them. Are you okay to tell me about some of those? 

KIMBERLEY - This is the crux of the matter and the reason why women don't ask for help, because the nature of the thoughts feel very shameful and they're taboo. You're worried as a new mum that if you express to a medical professional that you can't stop seeing violent or sexual horrible things happening to your baby and your mind over and over and over, that they're going to take the baby away from you, or they're going to take you away and lock you up somewhere. And that's why women stay silent and they don't ask for help or they don't tell their partners. 

EMMA - What was the moment where you had to tell? 

KIMBERLEY - I was very lucky that I was able to tell my husband straight away. We'd been together a long time. I didn't know I had OCD at the time. I didn't know perinatal OCD existed. I wasn't a candidate for OCD in my mind, what you would see on TV, I wasn't a germaphobe or anything like that. But I'd had what we now know to be a previous OCD episode years before. And so I was able to kind of look at him and say, I think it's happening again. I was such a great candidate to get better because I immediately asked for help. But even so, it still took me a year to get the help I needed. And then up to two years before I started to feel better. 

EMMA - A year is a very long time. 

KIMBERLEY - I'll give some leeway in that it was the pandemic. We were very isolated. But when I finally discovered I'd read an article online on the Mind website where somebody talked about postnatal OCD. And it was the first time I'd read something that was like, it's this. And I took that to my doctor and she agreed. And then we went through perinatal mental health department and they just had no idea what it was. I just kept…

EMMA - Gosh, and it happens to up to 17% of women in that period…

KIMBERLEY – It was terrifying... it was tough. And eventually it came to a point where I just thought, I'll just get him to his first birthday. That's the best I can do. I'll get everything set up so that him and my husband are, know where the utility bills are and know where his onesies are kept and everything and everything set up. 

EMMA - So you are preparing to take your own life. 

KIMBERLEY - Yes. 

EMMA - And how did, and tell me about the path out of that? 

KIMBERLEY - A combination, obviously, of getting the right therapy. So initially the wrong talking therapies can sometimes be detrimental to people with OCD because if an OCD person is fixated on what any thought that enters their mind means about them and their values and their character, then going to chat to somebody and them asking you, so why do you think you're having these thoughts is not a great place to start. So when I eventually got with an OCD specialist who treated me with ERP, exposure response prevention, um, slowly, very slowly, I started to see a difference. 

EMMA - Tell me about how that played out for you. What did you have to do? 

KIMBERLEY - A big problem with me and a lot of new mums is that my compulsions were mostly mental. So they were going on, they were invisible, basically. You will get women who are displaying, they can't stop sterilizing a bottle, the same bottle for hours and hours and hours. And obviously that's a very visible thing that you can see whereas everything was happening in my mind. And so I had to learn to rewire how I thought. The biggest thing I had to do was not care about the content of the thoughts. I had to let them wash over me. OCD thrives in the dark. It doesn't like having a light shine, shone on it because suddenly in the real world, it doesn't quite stand up. And slowly the anxiety will start to just decrease and you'll start to see things a little bit more clearly. 

EMMA - And how are you now? 

KIMBERLEY - I'm good. We're really good. You know, my little boy is, so he's five and a half now. He's thriving. He's wonderful. I was so worried back in those days that I was ruining everything. I kept saying that I'm ruining everything. I'm ruining his start. You know, I'm ruining our bond. And that just isn't the case. We have such a strong bond. We're so close and tactile and affectionate. And those were things I could only dream of back then. 

EMMA - Kimberley's story is powerful and she is not alone. It's thought that up to 17% of women experience perinatal OCD at some point, either in their pregnancy or during the first year of their baby's life.

Mental health charity Anna Freud, which focuses on scientific and clinical innovation, has just released some research which found that 500 new psychological practitioners need to be recruited in England and integrated into the maternal health care system. That's to adequately support women who need it for perinatal mental health across the board, including for OCD.

 Dr. Camilla Rosan, a consultant in perinatal clinical psychology, who led the research, is with me. Hi, Camilla. 

CAMILLA - Hi, Emma. Lovely to be on the show with you. 

EMMA - It's lovely to have you, Camilla.

As a mum myself, I hadn't really heard of perinatal OCD, but looking back on my experiences with small babies and the experiences of my friends, it's not now surprising that it is a reasonably common condition.

Now, I did talk to Kimberley Nixon about what perinatal OCD is, but as a clinical expert, can you tell me a little bit more about the condition and how it affects women? 

CAMILLA - So perinatal OCD is OCD that happens in the perinatal period. So that's in pregnancy or the first year postnatally. It might also come up if you're having fertility treatments or around that kind of conception period. 

It's a condition where you have intrusive, unwanted thoughts and images. These thoughts and images become really scary to you. They're the opposite of what you feel. And to kind of counteract that anxiety, you start doing behaviours, often called compulsions, to try and reduce it. So they might be things like seeking reassurance from others. It might be kind of quite a lot of checking behaviour. It might be avoiding the thing that kind of triggers the intrusive thought. And unfortunately, in perinatal OCD, that might be your baby. But the key difference between an OCD intrusive thought and a thought that might be concerning is that is deeply distressing to the person experiencing it. It is not aligned to their values. It's something they don't want to do. And that's where the compulsions start, because they're trying to stop it from happening. And of course, that's not the case when there's a real safeguarding concern. 

EMMA - And why is it so prevalent in the perinatal period? 

CAMILLA - You know, you have this increased responsibility of a little baby. Everything is new. You're also likely to be deprived of sleep. Hormones can play a role, particularly in letting go of the thought. 

EMMA - What did your research look at and what did it find? 

CAMILLA - Our research was called the Integrate Project and we were really interested in understanding what are often called common or mild to moderate mental health difficulties in perinatal mental health. There's been a lot of funding that's gone into specialist perinatal mental health services. In many ways it's world leading and what's being left behind of the women that aren't meeting the threshold for their specialist services.

So in the Integrate project, we calculated for England, that was 115,000 women and birthing people who weren't meeting that threshold but were still experiencing mental health difficulties. So what we found in the Integrate project was that services are hugely complex and fragmented. They are not joined up. This is really confusing for women who are trying to find the right service to support the difficulty that they're having. And it's really confusing for midwives and health visitors who are trying to refer them to those services. And what we found across the board was that women and birthing people and professionals all say that they want more joined up services, more integrated services.

And what I mean by integrated services is where psychological practitioners who can deliver evidence-based therapies for perinatal mental health problems are embedded and working alongside those universal health practitioners. So they're in maternity services, they're in health visiting services, and they're working really closely together to provide joined up care. 

EMMA - And would that be in hospitals? 

CAMILLA - Exactly. So they'll be where the women are, but also in the community. If you've had, for example, a traumatic birth that might be linked to your OCD, you might not want to go back to your maternity service to receive psychological care. 

EMMA - And what happens if they don't receive it when they need it? 

CAMILLA - Unfortunately, OCD is very unlikely to get better on its own without access to psychological therapies. Often it can get worse. It's such a critical time when you're forming a really important relationship with your baby. 

EMMA - If someone is listening to Access All and this is either striking a chord with them or is striking a chord about a loved one, what should they do? 

CAMILLA - So I think a really important message is that OCD is treatable. I think it's approaching that conversation with compassion. These kinds of thoughts can be really stigmatising and shameful and really hard to admit. And then asking if these are things that are happening to you can I think be a helpful start. 

EMMA - The Department for Health and Social Care told us. 

BETH - No new mother should be left to suffer in silence when it comes to mental health and we are taking action to make sure they get the support they need. As well as providing record funding for mental health services this year, we're investing an additional £200m in the Healthy Babies Programme, which includes enhanced dedicated support for perinatal mental health. We have also just hit our target to hire 8,500 more mental health workers three years early and perinatal mental health services are now available nationwide. 

EMMA - For advice and support, you can check out the maternal OCD website. It's got lots of resources on there and they worked very closely with us to bring that story to you. And if this is something that you've been experiencing and you want to talk about it, please do get in touch. You can email accessall@bbc.co.uk. Kimberley Nixon, your book, She Seems Fine to Me, is out on the 7th of May and best of luck with all that follows.

Thank you to all my guests and to the lovely Beth Rose as well.

You can email me about anything disability, mental health, neurodivergence related. We're accessall@bbc.co.uk.

If you've been affected by any of the subjects we've covered on this episode, details of support are available on the BBC Action Line, that's bbc.co.uk/action line. And if you're outside the UK, it's befrienders.org.

Thank you so much for listening. 

I'll see you soon.

Bye.