Changing My Mind

by Margaret Trudeau

  And then I started speaking about courage and about myself, about my life, about Michel’s death, about my breakdowns and the many weeks I had spent in mental hospitals; I told them what it felt like to be so depressed that the whole world looks bleached of life and you dread the day. I told them about mania, and how I used to believe myself the most clever and most interesting woman in the world and how there was nothing, no feat, that I did not assume I could do. I told them about being frightened and miserable and confused and how there had been many, many days when I had wished I was dead. I told them what my illness had done to my family and how my children had suffered. I spoke for forty-five minutes without pausing or looking at my notes, and as I spoke I realized what an incredible relief it was not to have to pretend any longer. And when I stopped, the audience rose to their feet and clapped and clapped.

  After that, invitations began to pour in. From the 165 local branches of the Canadian Mental Health Association, from women’s lecture series and from insurance companies. They seemed especially keen to hear my message that if caught early, mental illness does not have to be crippling. I accepted all the invitations that I could. I talked to groups of a few hundred people in small church halls and audiences of several thousand in conference centres. The lectures brought in some money, which I desperately needed, but more than that, the work gave me a sense that I was, at last, doing something important. In my audiences were people who had felt just the way I had, and they were immensely reassured to hear someone saying the things that they had never dared to say. And there were families who had watched people they loved suffer without knowing what they were going through.

  I knew exactly what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I wanted to convey the message that mental illness attacks people of all ages and at all stages of life; that bipolar disorder stems from a chemical imbalance that can be treated; that bipolar illness has to be diagnosed before it gets too ingrained and before the cycles of mania and depression are too firmly entrenched—in fact, before the cycle has a chance to become a pattern in the brain; that mood-stabilizing drugs can not only maintain a balance but also slow down the progress of the illness.

  I wanted to warn women that in the world of patients, women who are mentally ill lie at the very bottom of the pile, frequently not treated for their physical ailments. In 2010, the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology conducted cross-country hearings as part of a broader examination by the federal government of the status of mental health care in Canada. During 130 hours of hearings with more than 300 witnesses testifying, what the committee heard over and over again was that patients with mental illness continue to be dismissed—especially if they are women. A man with a heart condition consistently gets more and better medical care than a woman with debilitating depression. Both patients have been put out of commission by their illness, but the physical problem gets the attention; the mental one gets short shrift.

  I wanted to convey how painful, terrifying, lonely and confusing mental illness is and how easily it can be made worse by addiction—to alcohol, to drugs, even to food. When life ceases to have meaning, I told my audiences, then you have to change it.

  I could not speak about other forms of mental illness, I told them, only about the one I had suffered from myself. I wanted to urge people not to live in a state of denial but to seek help, to face reality, not to lock themselves away and shut others out. I soon understood that the way to interest and draw in my audience was to tell it all like a story—my story—as if I were talking to them over the kitchen table, not preaching but having a conversation.

  The fact that I had lost many valuable years through not being diagnosed, that by the time I finally received the right treatment I had been deep into the pattern—this carried weight. People who are ill must not let this happen, I would say: too many bipolar sufferers are picked up and identified only once the police are called in. The highest rate of suicide among people with mental illnesses is for those who are bipolar. And to break the intensity of what I was saying, I learned to intersperse my talk with some lighter stories, even some jokes.

  A sample: There’s a joke I tell about denial. The husband in an elderly couple goes to his audiologist, complaining that his wife is losing her hearing and won’t see a doctor. “Well, why not figure out the range of her hearing?” the audiologist suggests. So the husband goes to the farthest room in the house and calls out, “Honey, what’s for dinner?” No response. The husband tries again and again, moving from room to room, a little closer each time and posing the same question. Finally, he gets right up to his wife’s ear and shouts, “Honey, what’s for dinner?” She replies, “For the fifth time, chicken!”

  I like to have the whole room shaking with laughter—and this joke always accomplishes that. Laughter is so important and it’s such a relief. Like we are after a rainstorm, everyone is happier.

  The shame, I tell my audience, is not in having a mental illness but in doing nothing about it. Looking out across the lecture room, I would see people nodding. Often, people in the audience cry.

  I know from the research that 90 per cent of marriages fail when one partner suffers from bipolar disorder. This may seem odd, but marriages involving two bipolar sufferers often endure—both individuals are on the same page.

  One controversial aspect of my talks is my mention of fibromyalgia. I will give these talks and later meet with members of the audience, and some dispute the fact that fibromyalgia is related to mental illness—but it often is. This is mental pain manifesting as physical pain. I had been put in a gilded cage, and this was the price I paid.

  I talk about the need for change, and how debilitating it is to live in your grief and be defined by it. I call it “woundology”—letting our pasts define our futures. These prisons of our own construction, these labels, are crippling. I talk about the importance of compassion and warm-heartedness, two values I prize highly, and forgiveness. You have to forgive yourself and what happened to you.

  So many women, women especially, are in denial. They blame life or their families or their husbands or their upbringing or sexual abuse. I know women who have been divorced twenty and thirty years, and they’re still angry. You can get enormously self-absorbed—like an injured animal crawling into a cave. You know when you’ve hit bottom; it’s the last stage before suicide.

  Eventually, you do get bored of your own issues, and sometimes the first job is getting a job and crawling out of that cave. Low self-esteem is the biggest disabler of people with mental illness, so volunteer work or paid work can help a person both gain confidence and get started. You need obligations and responsibilities.

  You need to be busy. If volunteer or paid work doesn’t suit you, enrol, enrol. Take yoga classes, cooking classes, tennis lessons. Get the ball rolling. I especially love to cook. Cooking is tactile; it involves mixing tastes and colours, it has a beginning and a middle and an end, and it involves nurturing others.

  The other thing I advise those who have suffered mental illness is to have an advocate. When you are mentally unbalanced, you don’t have the words; you need the questions to get the answers. Why this pill and not another? What are the side effects? Will I gain weight? The best advocate is someone who loves you but who has no personal stake in your outcome, someone who can access information for you, do research for you, speak up for you. Across Canada, the almost two hundred offices of the Canadian Mental Health Association offer an enormous wealth of information.

  I’m on the board of the new Institute for Mental Health, the beneficiary of a $20 million donation that was used to create the Centre for Brain Health at the University of British Columbia, where important research is underway into the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and psychiatric disorders. For me, the name of the centre is all important; it’s not a mental health facility, it’s a brain health centre.

  In the end, my message is perfectly simple: people get stuck in lives
of quiet desperation. They lose the courage to reach out for help. The stigma that surrounds mental illness means that no one likes to think that his or her mind is not functioning as it should. We accept that our lungs or livers may not be perfect—why not our brains? There is no quick fix, no one solution for everyone. Try everything, I say in my talks; never say no to anything that might help; be your own advocate if you can, but follow the advice of a doctor you trust. Intervene, I tell my listeners, for gentle intervention can be a lifeline for people who are unable to choose sanity unless they are helped to do so.

  Finally, anyone who has suffered mental illness should consider the simple pleasures of silence and space. Noise can be a huge distraction; at least it is for me. And sometimes noise can be the company of toxic friends whose useless chatter does you no good and possibly harm. Pierre never liked noise, and on that we could agree. Slowly, I learned to laugh again. I had forgotten the sheer pleasure of being able to laugh, to find things so funny that they lit up my day. The moment that I realized that my sense of laughter had really returned was in the spring of 2005, when I went with Sacha, Ally and Justin’s fiancée, Sophie Grégoire, to Cuba with a study group Sacha had organized. For some years, Sacha had been head of Canada World Youth, an organization that is partnered with twenty-five countries and that sends Canadians to other parts of the world, where they are billeted with families and can experience lives very different from their own.

  Sacha had been asked to visit Canadian youth on their Cuban visit, and our study group drove around the country—finding one Canadian in a bakery making cakes, another working in a medical centre, a third in a school. One evening I walked along the beach talking to a girl whose father had died shortly before. I reflected on the nature of grieving, and how I had never really grieved for my father. Now I was able to face it calmly.

  That night, there was a party. Sacha used his computer to play music and we all danced; I love dancing and I had not danced that way for many years. I felt so incredibly happy that I began to laugh. The laughter bubbling out of me was not because I had remembered something but simply because it was there in me, waiting to come out. I went behind one of the huts and shook and rocked and giggled until I was too weak to go on. Next morning, I woke up with the certain knowledge that I had at last put unmanageable grief behind me, that life was going to be possible.

  Real laughter has always done this for me. At Sacha’s wedding to Zoë Bedos on September 1, 2008, I slipped away from the table to let out the laughter rising in me. My teenage niece, sitting not far away, observed me leaving and followed me out. Watching me heave and shake, she hastened back to find Sacha.

  “We have a problem,” she said. “It’s your mom. I think she’s going crazy again.”

  Sacha knows me well. “Is she laughing or crying?” he asked his cousin.

  “She’s laughing.”

  “Oh, that’s fine then,” Sacha told her. “She’s just too happy.”

  For a very long time, I had thought that the rest of my life would be spent weeping. Now I knew that while I would always carry grief in my heart, I would also have joy and delight. As I had so painfully learned, life is a question of balance. For laughter and contentment, as for other things, there are tricks and rules to help.

  As Dr. Cameron had suggested, I made a practice of not watching disturbing programs on television at night. I did that for years, but I no longer feel the restriction is warranted. Not long ago, in the spring of 2010, I went out and saw a very scary Martin Scorsese film, a cross between a psychological thriller and a mystery, called Shutter Island. Violence on the screen still bothers me, so I simply look down.

  By day I would absorb the serious news, leaving night for comedy and laughter, to give the mind a rest and let it be still. On television, I like The Office, I like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, and I especially like Weeds—starring Mary-Louise Parker and about a newly widowed young suburban mother who makes ends meet by selling marijuana. And one movie that really makes me laugh is Planes, Trains & Automobiles, a comedy from 1987, starring Steve Martin and John Candy, about two badly matched strangers who become travelling companions and try to get home for Thanksgiving.

  I’m wondering now if I will grow sunnier with age. Once my estrogen levels dropped, a window opened. Maybe I’ll smile ‘til the end of my days. Is it wisdom? Is it knowing that I have survived so many blows and have seen that I can take what life brings? I am surprised by my own resilience, but maybe I shouldn’t be. I remember telling a friend about things from my past, then adding, “I will not be crushed. I come from a long line of fighters.” I now know that it’s possible to be knocked down hard and bounce back, with new projects and a sense of wonder.

  Gardening continues to bring me joy. I can get emotional thinking of all the gardens I have created, and lost, in my lifetime. Twenty-four Sussex, Harrington Lake, Newboro Lake: those gardens were the victims of moves and lost marriages. But I keep on creating new gardens. The deck on my Montreal condominium is small, but there’s ample space to grow tomatoes and herbs in Mexican clay pots. I have so many pairs of garden gloves, but I never use them. I like to get my nails into the dirt, to feel the roots and the tendrils. I love gardening, and I get that from my grandmother, who gardened to live. Placing a seed in soil is such a simple act of faith, but simplicity—I now know—is where the joy is.

  Painting is another source of joy for me. For my sixtieth birthday, Justin and Sacha gave me a set of watercolours and an easel, and I took a course at a fabulous visual-arts centre close to where I live. I am not a good painter; I’m terrible, in fact. But I do have a good eye, so I’ll just keep at it. Other than yoga, painting is the only activity that puts me into a state of nothingness, where I lose all sense of time and space. I so love the process of applying colour to canvas, and I love art and I always have. I can get swept away by beautiful pieces of art. One of my most precious pieces (to me, anyway) is a painting I have of a girl alone in a field—a gift from a celebrated French-Canadian painter at the time I married Pierre. It’s starkly beautiful.

  And I continue to take photographs—too many. One more creative outlet.

  In the ten years since I left the Royal Ottawa Hospital, many good things have happened to me. Justin and Sacha are both married to wonderful partners, and they have children of their own, who bring me unfailing pleasure. I have fallen in love with my grandchildren, and our family is growing in a delightful way. I am included once again in Fried’s family gatherings, though for my first visit to the house on the lake in many years I decided to sleep not in the house but in my own tent, perched by the water’s edge. I have travelled and campaigned for WaterCan and given countless talks on bipolar illness. Over time, my ambition has only grown to talk to, and on behalf of, all those who suffer from bipolar disorder and those who have to live with them.

  I remember acting as a child of ten in a skit at school. I played the role of an old man whose wife had died and he had scorched his shirt with an iron and burned his dinner and he was very much alone and depressed. I just sat in a rocking chair and whittled. News of the skit reached the local chapter of the Canadian Mental Health Association; the mini-drama was entered into a competition they were running, and I got the prize.

  I had seen, first-hand, depression in the elderly. When Grandma Sinclair died, Grandpa came and lived with us for a while and he was so sad, having lost the love of his life. He didn’t want to live; she was his east, his north, his west and his south. This happens so often when a marriage has been solid. One partner dies, and the other soon follows. And, sure enough, in six months Grandpa Sinclair was dead.

  So, at the age of ten, I was on stage delivering a message about depression. Fifty-two years later, I was back on the job—delivering a message about depression.

  Looking back, I would say I had great teachers—at school, at university, from my family, Pierre Trudeau and Yves Lewis, and at dinners sitting next to Indira Gandhi and Chou En-lai, Fidel Castro
, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. It was Rosalynn Carter who gave me my marching orders and later got me thinking about mental health issues. She knew how I had suffered.

  In 2007, I decided to follow Justin, Sacha and Ally to Montreal, where the boys had made their lives and where Ally had been accepted to Concordia University. When my first grandson was born, on December 21, 2006, my heart had exploded: I was head-over-heels in love with little Pierre Trudeau. With a speed and ease that would never have been conceivable in my earlier days, I sold my house, packed my boxes and found a condominium from the 1920s in downtown Montreal.

  I had told Dr. Cameron that I would never be able to move house because of the boxes—dozens and dozens of boxes full of things in my basement, things that made me cry every time I thought of them. The day will come, he said, when you’ll be able to do it. And he was right.

  Soon enough I would have proof of my healing. In March of 2009, a dear, dear friend of mine died in hospital, and I was there for him. I helped him die. Grief did not overwhelm me as it had in the past. This time I had the tools.

  My friend’s name was Guy Rivet, and I had met him in Ottawa some thirty years beforehand, when he ran a New Age store in the ByWard Market. Later, he became a chef and taught courses in cooking at Lester B. Pearson College in Montreal. When I moved to that city, he was the only person I knew, and of course we reconnected. When I first arrived we would “date” every Saturday night (he was a gay man, and thus the quotation marks), and sometimes we’d go to refined restaurants where his students had found work.