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Woman's Hour

Supporting a child with depression, Flexible working, Maggie O'Farrell, Paint recycling, Carers and the pandemic.

Woman's Hour

BBC

Society & Culture

4.13K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2020

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Liz Brookes looks after her husband Mike, who has had vascular dementia and Chris Black cares for his wife, Helen, who has Picks disease, or Frontotemporal dementia. How have they coped during the pandemic? We also hear from Emily Holzhausen, Director of Policy and Public Affairs from Carers UK.

Has the Covid crisis helped to usher in a future of flexible working? A new report from the campaign Flex Appeal says while that forced remote working during a pandemic is not the same as flexible working, there are lessons that can be learned from lockdown. Anna Whitehouse aka Mother Pukka who co-founded Flex Appeal, and Louise Deverell-Smith who runs Daisy Chain, an online platform that matches flexible employers with flexible job-seekers discuss.

As part of our new series on life and shoes, we speak to Carmen about her espadrilles her mother danced in decades ago.

Josh suffered his first major depressive episode just before he was due to take his A levels. At university his mental health deteriorated further. Josh and his mum Mandy have written a book 'The Boy Between'. They tell us about their experiences – in Josh’s case, learning to live with depression, and in Mandy’s case how best to support and help someone you love who suffers with depression.

Cat Hyde is one of the founders of Seagulls, a project which takes leftover paint and repurposes it into new paint. They take volunteers such as Ash, a young woman who now works at their paint shop, who says that working at Seagulls was vital in her regaining her confidence. Maggie O’Farrell’s first picture book for children, 'Where Snow Angels Go By' is the story of a brave little girl who is visited by her snow angel in her time of need. The idea for the book grew out of a story Maggie told her own sick child in the back of an ambulance.

Presenter: Jane Garvey Producer: Dianne McGregor

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

0:06.0

Hi, good afternoon, and a warm welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour.

0:09.8

Now, this week we are going to talk about carers, many of whom, of course, have been having

0:14.0

a really tough time in lockdown, so we'll discuss that in a moment.

0:18.2

You can also hear from Mother and Son Amanda and Josh.

0:23.0

Amanda is trying her best to support Josh who has depression.

0:28.0

She's in his early 20s and it's been difficult for the entire family.

0:32.1

You can hear about that a little later.

0:34.2

And we also have award-winning novelist Maggie O'Farrell.

0:37.6

There is nothing that replaces that kind of bubble that you get into with the child when

0:41.2

you're sharing a story or a narrative with them and you can talk about it and you're

0:44.0

both inhabiting this imaginative space.

0:46.5

It's irreplaceable.

0:47.5

So please, I always urge people to carry on reading to your toes as long as they want.

0:51.7

The great Maggie O'Farrell, more from her a little later, and we also celebrate the

0:55.7

shoes that Carmen treasures because they were her mothers.

1:00.0

Your life in shoes, something we'll be exploring on woman's hour in the next couple of weeks.

1:05.7

Now research from carers UK showed that four in five carers report they're still providing

1:12.0

more care than before lockdown and nearly two thirds have said they are really worried

1:17.9

about how they're going to carry on managing over the course of this really challenging

1:22.4

winter.

1:23.6

Well, back in April, we spoke to Liz Brooks who did work as a nurse.

...

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