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Meteorologist has panic attack live on air, prompting wave of praise
An TV meteorologist is being praised for how he handled an on-air panic attack.
ABC News Australia’s Nate Byrne was presenting his weather segment on Tuesday’s Daily Breakfast when he felt the attack coming on.
“I’m actually going to need to stop for a second. Some of you may know that I occasionally get affected by some panic attacks, and actually that’s happening right now, Lisa, maybe I could hand back to you,” he said before cameras cut to his colleague.
“You certainly can Nate,” said the show’s co-host Lisa Mitchell, going on to promote a piece Byrne previously wrote about the same topic.
“It’s fantastic that he has been so open and transparent about it. And the response when he first wrote about it and spoke about it was that everyone said, ‘Thank God. Nate’s not perfect. We thought he was perfect, but actually he’s now sharing something,'” she said. “We’ll put that up, and you can get a little bit of an understanding of some of the things that go on with our brains and our bodies when we’re doing live television.”
Later, Mitchell welcomes Byrne back. “Very pleased to say that our wonderful colleague Nate is back with us,” she said.
“Sorry if I gave anybody a bit of a scare there,” Byrne said.
The clip of the incident has now gone viral, with more than 4.6 million views on the network’s TikTok alone, and people are applauding Byrne and the team for highlighting something that happens to many people.
“He handled that like a champ. as someone who’s gone through this myself I’m literally in tears,” one user commented.
“Being vulnerable is so scary but also so empowering! thank you for being so transparent and honest with us, you’re not alone!!” another user wrote.
“They both handled this so seamlessly! Really beautiful and authentic,” another commented.
“Not only did she handle it with grace, but she PRAISED him for being vulnerable & credited his price ab it. I’m sobbing. This is beautiful,” another wrote.
Panic attacks are common, according to the Cleveland Clinic, with up to 11% of people in the United States experiencing at least one. Approximately 2% to 3% of people in the U.S. have a panic disorder, the clinic notes.
This isn’t the first time an on-air meteorologist has shared a typically private moment on screen for all their viewers.
Last year, CBS Los Angeles viewers witnessed a scary moment when KCAL News meteorologist Alissa Carlson fainted live on air, just as she was about to deliver a weather forecast.
Fully recovered, she joined “CBS Mornings” at the time to share how she’s doing and what doctors say caused the sudden collapse: a condition called vasovagal syncope.
Workers removing tree branches near a historic cathedral in Chelm, Poland, unearthed something unexpected when they came upon two children’s skeletons in a shallow burial pit where no gravesites are marked, the government’s Culture Ministry said.
Neither skeleton was buried in a coffin and one of the children was buried with the characteristics of an anti-vampire burial, Dr. Stanisława Gołuba, the archaeologist leading the research, said in a Facebook post. The child’s head was separated from its body, the post said, and the skull was facing down into the ground arranged on a stone. This, plus the way the skeletons were oriented, appears to be consistent with ancient burial methods used to prevent a person thought to be a demonic entity from exiting the grave, Gołuba said.
The skeletons appeared to be from the Early Middle Ages.
The children’s skeletons were removed from their graves, documented and waiting for further analysis, the statement said.
It’s the most recent in a series of findings in Poland of remains buried in ways that suggest people at the time believed they were dealing with vampires or other supernatural entities.
In 2022, Polish researchers found the remains of a woman at a gravesite in the village of Pień with a sickle around her neck and a triangular padlock on her foot. According to ancient beliefs, the padlock was supposed to prevent a deceased person thought to be a vampire from returning from the dead. The sickle was thought to cut the neck if the corpse tried to rise from the grave.
Professor Dariusz Polinski of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun said this type of practice became common throughout Poland in the 17th century in response to a reported vampire epidemic. In addition to practices with a sickle, sometimes corpses were burned, smashed with stones or had their heads and legs cut off.
Six so-called “vampire skeletons” were also found at a cemetery in northwest Poland in 2013. Each was buried with either a sickle laid across their necks or stones placed beneath their jaws said Lesley Gregoricka of the University of South Alabama who led the research team.
contributed to this report.
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