Margaret Trudeau spoke about her turbulent life as the wife of a former prime minister and her struggle to fight depression and bipolar disorder at the Wu Conference Centre last Wednesday.
“We have this tremendous capacity to deny that there is something wrong with us,” Trudeau said, summing up everything she said in one short sentence.
Trudeau, the author of the bestselling book, Changing My Mind, which documents these personal experiences, brought her newest title The Time of Your Life to Fredericton as a part the University of New Brunwick’s Andrews Initiative Year of Creativity & Inspiration talks. The book offers women approaches to creating a healthy, happy, secure and satisfying future for themselves, something Trudeau has fought for her entire life.
Trueau has been recognized for her work to combat mental illness and said it is something still not taken seriously by society.
Trudeau said every time she met a doctor or a psychiatrist and asked what she could do to alleviate her symptoms, they would say having enough time for sleep and a balanced diet were the best medicines.
It was something she said had a lot of impact on her childhood. She would go to bed early because lack of sleep was the cause of any fight among her and her siblings. She also had a healthy diet, with sugar only on some Sundays, and she would play outside with her sisters every time they came back from school.
Trudeau said all these habits were lost in time once she started university. This was also around the time she met Pierre Trudeau while on a summer trip. They got married in secret after she graduated.
Trudeau said she had her first experience with depression after the birth of her second child. The doctor had called it “baby blues” at the time. It was 1973 and there was not much advancement in the mental area of medicine, no one knew about depression or the difference between people with mental health problems or simply any kind of addiction. She did not know what was happening to her.
This post-partum depression was only the beginning of what she called her “roller coaster.” Trudeau said people with mental illness go through moments of shame and glory. One hour you are feeling great with everything and everyone and then, you fall.
“When you eat sugar, you feel good because it is delicious, but then you have a crash and need sugar to get you up again, and that’s what happens when you are bipolar,” she said.
She said human beings themselves don’t ask much of their brains, but sometimes things don’t always happen the way they should. For example, if you do not get enough sleep, you lack serotonin, a hormone that helps with mood balance, making you feel happy. Without this hormone, people with depression do not feel the need to laugh or smile.
People with mental illnesses isolate themselves and, for Trudeau, life with her ex-husband was very isolating. Eventually, the marriage came to an end, and Trudeau married again and had more children.
Her second bout of post-partum depression developed with the birth of her fifth child, but the death of her son Michel in 1998 sent her to rock bottom. He was killed by an avalanche while skiing.
Trudeau said she stopped taking care of herself, she did not care about anything, and she saw no reason to live. She lost both her son and all sense of reason, leading to the end of another marriage.
With the help of the police, she went to the hospital. She said it took 72 hours to accept and understand she had a mental illness. The doctor told her she had to choose whether to get treatments or go home and get worse. For three years, she went to therapy.
Trudeau, who went public with her struggles only a decade ago, has advocated for reducing the social stigma surrounding mental illness. She was awarded the honourary degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Western Ontario in 2013 in recognition of her work, something she plans to continue in hopes of changing the minds of all.
“What I did that helped myself a lot was want to get better, and accept my mental illness, accept myself.”
