Australian meteorologist Nate Byrne was in the middle of a morning weather report on August 13 when his words began to slightly falter.
“We’ve got big falls…right through that part of the country,” Bryne said, pausing and taking a deep breath. “And we’re going to see lots more rain in the days ahead—”
Bryne then cuts himself off mid-sentence.
“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,” Bryne said, speaking quickly. “Uh, Lisa, maybe, I uh, could hand back to you?”
“You certainly can Nate,” ABC News Australia host Lisa Miller replied calmly, without skipping a beat.
“And Nate wrote a great piece on the ABC online website about this, and I reckon we might re-up it, because it’s fantastic that he has been so open and transparent about it.”
Byrne’s article — “Live TV triggered my first panic attack, and I still deal with anxiety” — was first published in February 2022. In his piece, Bryne details a day at the station where he had two panic attacks in the span of 15 minutes.
“All of a sudden, my body started tingling, my heart rate rose and I realized I was drenched in sweat,” Bryne wrote. “As soon as the camera was off me, I dropped my on-air demeanor and doubled over, trying to catch my breath, light headed and confused about what was happening.”
But 15 minutes later, Bryne had a second panic attack. And this one, he wrote, nearly “broke” him.
“This time, it was much worse,” he wrote. “I started shaking, my vision narrowed, my heart was pounding like I'd run a marathon, I couldn't breathe.”
The station slotted in another correspondent so that the broadcast wasn’t interrupted, but the experience left him in tears.
Fortunately, he was given the day off to speak to a doctor, and those heart-pounding, mind-racing, bouts of fear were diagnosed as panic attacks.
Over the next few years, Bryne regularly met with a psychologist and learned how to manage his symptoms with the aid of beta blockers.
But one of the shining lights in his mental health recovery has been the unwavering support from his coworkers, including Miller and their fellow broadcaster, Michael Rowland.
“You might have seen Nate experience a panic attack earlier this morning while presenting the News Breakfast weather,” Rowland wrote in an Instagram post on August 13.
“Nate’s open about his panic attacks — he’s even written about them before — and he’s doing okay!”
In his post, Rowland sings the praises of his coworker, and says he gave him “a bear hug off-camera” after his panic attack subsided.
“As a team, we’ll always have your back, Nate,” he wrote. “Always.”
The clip of Byrne having a panic attack on-air quickly went viral (at the time of publication the video was rapidly approaching 3 million views on TikTok).
But Byrne told BBC that the response from viewers has been “incredible.”
The comments beneath the now viral clip are filled with words of support.
“This is the greatest, seamless, grown-up media handling of simple mental realities I’ve ever seen,” one person wrote.
“Not only did [Lisa] handle it with grace, but she praised him for being vulnerable and credited his piece about it…this is beautiful,” another person added.
“I’m blown away by how graciously this was handled,” a viewer commented. “As someone who personally deals with chronic anxiety, this meant a lot to me.”
In the wake of the viral clip, Byrne has spoken up even further about his mental health.
“So many people have a story about anxiety, or have some experience with it,” Byrne told the BBC.
“After I first spoke about it publicly, a lot of people have come to me and said that they didn’t know what they were having was a panic attack [and] they didn’t know other people have panic attacks.”
For anyone suffering from chronic anxiety and panic attacks, Byrne recommends they do what he did on the very first day it happened: go see a doctor.
He added, “Talking to someone is probably the best thing you can do.”
Header images via ABC News Australia / TikTok
