‘Below Deck Med’: This Isn’t the First Panic Attack Hannah Ferrier Has Had on the Show

Hannah Ferrier from Below Deck Mediterranean is seen having a full-blown panic attack on the show, but it isn’t the first time Ferrier has felt overwhelming anxiety at work.

“I f**king hate this f**king job,” Ferrier seen saying to herself in a preview clip. “This season has made me feel like, I’m losing my mind,” she says in a confessional. Cameras capture Ferrier in her bunk, placing her hand on her forehead, appearing as though she’s ready to pass out.

A crew member checks on Ferrier. “I think … it’s a panic attack,” Ferrier replies, audibly unable to catch her breath. The scene is shocking, but this isn’t the first time Ferrier has experienced extreme anxiety while on the show.

Hannah Ferrier had a panic attack during season 3

Ferrier became overwhelmed when she was in a relationship with bosun Conrad Empson. She panicked because she could tell she was falling for him. Captain Sandy Yawn seemed concerned, which is when Ferrier admitted she was having a panic attack.

Yawn was understanding, gently telling Ferrier not to run from love. She allowed Ferrier to rest in her bunk while the crew worked. However, once Ferrier returned to work Yawn became furious when Ferrier and Empson went on a voyage with the guests. Yawn told Ferrier she could only go for “one Coke” but Ferrier was away from the boat for far longer.

“I hadn’t seen her that mad. I thought her limit was the firecracker thing, it was not,” she told Decider.

She said the anxiety was building for days

“The anxiety had been going quite badly for eight days leading up to the attack, it didn’t just come out of nowhere,” she recalled about the moment to Decider. “What I was doing at the time [was asking], “What is different from season one to now?” And all I could think was Conrad.”

“Looking back and watching the season now, actually there was a lot that was different,” she continued. “We had the most vile charter guests that we have ever had. The first two weeks I was doing four hours of sleep a night consecutively. Sandy was really quite hard on me throughout the start of the season.”

“Also you don’t get away. You can’t get away from the cameras, you can’t get away from the work environment, the charter guests just keep coming,” she said. “In a normal job you can go home and sit down with your partner or your girlfriend and have a glass of wine and unleash and talk about it. Even when we are speaking with our families we don’t have much time. Everything just goes into your head as opposed to coming out, which is what you do in a normal scenario.”

She also had a panic attack during season 1

“It was something that happened in season 1 and I hid it a bit better then,” she admitted. “Well, a lot better. It’s really a personal thing. We aren’t Housewives, these aren’t our private lives, this is cameras following us at work.”

“The response was really amazing,” she said. “It was disappointing to see a few people saying, ‘Oh, it’s a drama queen.’ I was like, I wouldn’t be on Bravo, I would be accepting my Oscar if I could act like that. A lot of people reached out and said, ‘I didn’t know that anyone else got the physical symptoms that I got.’ Because people don’t talk about it. There are obviously a lot of people in the world that feel really alone in terms of getting that sort of anxiety.”

“People who don’t suffer anxiety or aren’t close to somebody, get stress and anxiety confused and they are two very different things,” she added. “So I think it was good to see people’s response that they felt less alone. And somebody who, in their eyes I guess, somebody who has a good life, travels the world, has opportunities and all of that. This year we have seen with Kate Spade and so many cases where you can have what everyone else pictures as the perfect life, especially with Instagram, this glossy perfect life and there are things going on behind closed doors that nobody knows about. I think the viewers appreciated the fact that they could see another side of me.”