She receives us in her apartment bathed in light from the Vallon des Fleurs in Nice.This is where Véronique Labedade, 61 years old, bi-polar for 20 years, lives.On the round table in the living room, she has the presentation sheets of the "2 poles" lighthouse.The association she created 4 years ago, to help bipolar people.*
"It is a graphic designer friend who drew the logo. He is a lighthouse because he lights up the one who is isolated and lost in the night." Lost Véronique was."I wandered for many years in the disease."
Today, she lives "like everyone else".Without hospitalization for 13 years.
"We are warriors and warriors, because it takes courage to get up and start again." She tells her "fight".
The first "crisis", the internment, the life that shatters, denial before "reconstruction".
"I broke out, I went in the manic phase"
"I lived normally until the age of 41."Married and mother of a teenager, Véronique works as a ready-to-wear shop in the Grande-Motte when the crisis occurs.
"I broke out. I left in the manic phase. I had to be hospitalized in Montpellier."
"The bars, the doors that slam, the sound of the keys in the lock, the cries. It was horrible. Diving in the psychiatric world was very violence. I felt like I am in the film"Flight above a cuckoo nest." It was for me total misunderstanding. "
She stopped for a short time before telling us about an anecdote: "Besides me, there was a lady who drew the ocean. As he was empty, I asked her why she did not represent fish, she m'answered because I want to have the whole room to swim there. "
After a month, the diagnosis falls."I was told that I was manic-depressive. 20 years ago, we did not say bipolar. My daughter, who was 15 years old at the time helped me a lot, she had to grow up from aCoup. After 3 weeks in a psychiatric hospital, I was released in nature. There was a less good care at the time. "
His couple cannot resist."In general, when the disease declares itself we lose everything, its spouse, its job. I found myself without work, without income. I was alternating the maniac and depressive phases."
Wandering in the disease: from denial to stabilization
"I followed my daughter in Nice. At 16, she joined the Hotel Lycée Paul Augier. It was she who saved me."For her, she clings.
On the French Riviera, she also finds her sister and mother.
"I lived first in my mother in Vence. But I was not stabilized. Every 4-5 months I was in the manic or depression. I wandered for many years in the disease, I'was in denial. The refusal of the disease, the refusal of the drugs that make people fat, I took 30 kg in 20 years. This denial lasts time to find a treatment, the right adjustment, it took me severalyears."
It also evokes the gaze of others, the fear that the disease arouses."We are stigmatized, and each time a news factory implies a bipolar person it is specified, suddenly it maintains this fear. We are no more violent or even less than the average of the population. We are very often insuffering, and we hurt ourselves. By the risks that we take in the maniac phase, but also often due to cardiovascular problems, we have 10 to 15 years of life expectancy less than theothers."
A book arouses a click in her."Reading nothing is opposed to the night of Delphine de Vigan, where she tells the life of her bipolar mother, I realized that this disease would use me in a form of selfishness. I was not looking at my daughterAnd her suffering. So I put everything in place so that she no longer has this weight on her shoulders. "
It uses a medico-psychological center."With the help of Doctor Giordana, I settled in a therapeutic apartment. Then we set up a follow -up with a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a referent nurse. It took me ten years to stabilize, J'Hope some will take less time. In my career I was lucky to be surrounded by beautiful people. "
*This testimony was published for the first time in February 2019.
