Dr Carmel Harrington on SIDS & SUIDS, Triple Risk and Sleep for Health Introduction

Today we are visiting sleep again and unapologetically. So it’s a timely reminder for us all. And you know, I’m obviously very focused on sleep, both professionally and personally but I like to have a reminder on a regular basis as to just how important it is. And today’s guest knows a great deal about this subject.

Her name is Dr. Carmel Harrington. And Carmel is a researcher, a lecturer, an author, and an expert on sleep. Her wonderful book, A Complete Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep, has been adorning my waiting room for many years and it’s a wonderful book that I would recommend to you all.

She shares with us a personal story, which I think you will find very confronting and very interesting. I won’t spoil it for you. Look, I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Carmel Harrington.

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Podcast Transcript

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:00:08 ] Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Before we start, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which I am recording this podcast, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and recognize their continuing connection to land waters and culture. I pay my respects to their elders of the past, present, and emerging.

Well, today we are visiting sleep again and unapologetically. So it’s a timely reminder for us all. And you know, I’m obviously very focused on sleep, both professionally and personally but I like to have a reminder on a regular basis as to just how important it is. And today’s guest knows a great deal about this subject.

Her name is Dr. Carmel Harrington. And Carmel is a researcher, a lecturer, an author, and an expert on sleep. Her wonderful book, A Complete Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep, has been adorning my waiting room for many years and it’s a wonderful book that I would recommend to you all.

She shares with us a personal story, which I think you will find very confronting and very interesting. I won’t spoil it for you. Look, I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Dr. Carmel Harrington. Welcome to the show, Carmel.

Dr Carmel Harrington [00:01:33 ] Thanks for having me, Ron. It’s exciting to be here.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:01:35 ] Thank you. Listen, Carmel, your journey has been an incredible one, really. We’ve been just touching on it before we came on air but, you know, you’ve been a teacher, you’ve been a lawyer, you’ve done a Ph.D. in sleep. Can you just run us through how that happened?

Dr Carmel Harrington [00:01:51 ] Why.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:01:51 ] Why?

Dr Carmel Harrington’s Journey

Dr Carmel Harrington [00:01:53 ] Life is an interesting journey and it often takes directions that you never anticipated a nine-year-old.  So when I first left school, as it was in those days, many years ago, one of the careers for women was teaching so closely toddled off to teaching and realized I didn’t really enjoy education so much. So I decided to then specialize in my actual initial love, which is biochemistry. And I was a biochemist for quite a number of years. And then the realization came that as a biochemist, you don’t make much money, especially in Australia.

The sciences aren’t paid very well at all. So I retrained as a lawyer and I actually specialized in that area in medical law, which was really interesting. So I was using it because it was clinical biochemistry I was doing. That was really interesting and I was quite happy in that.

Unfortunately, at that point, my son died. I had three children and I had a toddler that two and I had my son Alexander was about four and I had two-year-old twins or nearly two-year-old twins. And Damian died one night completely out of the blue, no reason whatsoever. And of course, it shatters you and it takes ages to pick up the pieces. But it never made sense to me how could a perfectly healthy toddler die one night.

No explanation, nothing at all. And I’d go and speak to whoever I could speak to and they just would say, it’s tragic. Go home and have more babies. Well, that irritated the scientist in me, incredibly. And so I started researching this area. And, you know, it was really tragic. We call it Sudden Infant Death Syndrome but these days because Damian was almost two, it would be referred to as sudden unexplained death in childhood.

Now, we think these deaths at this age of two is really, really rare. Well, it’s not it’s just not talked about very much. And so the more I researched this, the more I kept thinking we might not know what’s wrong with these children. It’s not obvious clearly. But there’s something fundamentally wrong to have such a catastrophic outcome, you know, healthy one minute and did the next.

So as a biochemist, I became very interested in what was happening, that most of these deaths do occur in sleep or that it’s presumed, they’re all presumed to occur in sleep but we’re not one hundred percent sure because no one is actually after death think. So the thing that looks out to you in your sleep is your autonomic nervous system, and that’s the nervous system that reacts, you know, arouses you.

Dr Carmel Harrington [00:04:43 ] Make sure that you breathe when you’re meant to, make sure that your heart rate increases when it’s meant to, etc., etc. So I actually gave up the law and decided to undertake study until my Ph.D. in the autonomic nervous system in infants. And so of course that was in sleep so I had to learn all about sleep, which was a huge learning curve.

In those days, we had these big machines that the pens would go all night and you’d have lot of paper this thick that you had to go through. And so you had to learn all about sleep. And then, of course, you had to understand the autonomic nervous system. So I did my Ph.D. and of course, the realities of life came back.

By that time, I was a single mom and I needed money to bring my children up and send them to school, like to educate them that schools. [00:05:41 ]I wanted them just to be expensive [1.2s] so I went back to law and at the same time I was doing clinical work, but mostly I studying law. And I was working again in sleep and I was getting lots of lectures around sleep, but adults sleep more than infants sleep and lots of people were so interested and it amazed me, I forgot that I didn’t really know much about sleep before I started.

And it amazes me how little people actually knew about sleep and how interested they were. And so one night after one of these lectures, and I was sort of traveling the world doing this sort of these talks and someone said to me, what book can I read about this? I said, well, there is no one book out there at the moment, but there’s lots of papers.

So I refer them to some academic journals. And of course, this person will want if you write the book.  And that was the start of my public life. And since then, of course, I’ve written two books and I do a lot of work, both in the adult world of Slate, but also my research is still ongoing at the Children’s Hospital with me. And we’re looking at the biochemistry now of the autonomic nervous system. And so it’s going really well. It’s a long journey, but it’s exciting.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:06:54 ] Wow, wow, wow. I mean, this was how long ago did Damien died?

Dr Carmel Harrington [00:06:59 ] 30 years ago.

Dr Ron Ehrlich [00:07:00 ] 30 years ago. So this was and my kids are of the similar age. You know, this was something that we’re hearing a lot about and really, tell us a little bit about the condition as it was understood as it is understood now. How common is it? What’s the story about.

Sudden Unexpected Infant death (SUID)

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

Dr Carmel Harrington [00:07:21 ] Look you’re right, Ron. Wasn’t it something we were all scared of at that time because there was very little ability to monitor children? You just hope against hope that it wouldn’t happen to you. At the time when Damien died, it was more common than it is now. And just after his death, I had this back-to-sleep campaign where babies weren’t being put on their tummy.

I think we got a decade before Damien was born, there was this push to put babies on their tummy and you sort of sleep on their tummy. That change because the incidence of sudden infant death was much higher in those babies that had been put to sleep in their last sleep on their tummy. So they did this back-to-sleep campaign. And there were babies are put to sleep on their back and recommended not to put on their stomach.

As a consequence, the rate of SIDS decreased dramatically, however, at the same time, we reorganize definitions so states now is startled. So there’s sudden infant death in infancy or SIDS, and sudden unexpected death in childhood. And there’s a very thorough crime scene investigation which it has to be. So as a consequence of that investigation and very strict guidelines on what can be called as SIDS. If a baby is found face down, then it’s not called the SIDS anymore. It’s called a Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy or SUDI because they believe that this is an explanation for the death because the baby suffocated.

Now, as a consequence of that, the figures look bette