By Diane Strandberg - The Tri-City News
Published: October 14, 2008 6:00 PM

Courage, self-awareness, support and therapy are needed to battle bipolar disease — and not just pharmaceuticals — Margaret Trudeau told high school and college students Thursday during a talk at Douglas College’s David Lam campus to mark Mental Illness Awareness Week.

Once a media target for her jetsetting life and for being the wife of a prime minister 30 years her senior, Trudeau is now an advocate and a popular speaker who tells her life story to shed light on the disease she suffered for many years.

She shared with about 100 students and teachers anecdotes and memories, many of them painful, including how she dealt with the death of her son, Michel, in 1998, and the difficulties she experienced as a young mother at 24 Sussex Dr. as the wife of the late Pierre Trudeau.

She blamed her refusal to accept her mental illness for many of her troubles and urged others facing similar symptoms to reach out.

“The shame is not having a mental illness,” Trudeau said. “The shame is having one and not seeking help.”

Margaret Trudeau

Looking fit and healthy, the 60-year-old grandmother said she was a bag of bones six years ago and didn’t have the strength or will to leave her house. Losing a son was so painful, she didn’t think she would recover.

“It was a five year-long process of reclaiming my right to be happy,” she said about the turmoil following the death of Michel, who was swept into Kokanee Lake in an avalanche. “You feel so guilty that you’re enjoying your life and they’re not.”

Her real progress toward recovery began when she was taken against her will to hospital, where she was put under the charge of a nutritionist as well as a therapist who teamed up to bring her back to health. She credits sleep, good eating habits and exercise with helping her achieve emotional balance, although she also has her psychiatrist on speed dial and will have to take medication for her bipolar disease for the rest of her life.

Facing her many losses and disappointments took therapy, and she had to learn new tools and coping mechanisms to keep a lid on her emotions.

“You have to be careful of the extremes, the exaggerations cause all the chaos.” But keeping an even keel is hard to do in grief because “you sure miss them every day.”

Trudeau says fear of the unknown and the stigma of being labelled keeps people in denial. She was afraid medication would kill her spirit, the energy and vivacity she said attracted her first husband, who she met on a family vacation to Tahiti.

Trudeau said her experiences of depression started after the birth of her second child, Alexandre (Sacha) but could have been brought on by her addiction to marijuana, which she used to self-medicate. She no longer uses the drug and warned the young people in the audience that marijuana in 2008 is not “the old Cadillac” of her day. It’s much stronger and “all part of the problem I’ve had,” she admitted. “Drug addiction and mental illness go hand in hand.”

Stopping the blame game was another step to recovery. Although it was difficult to live under the media spotlight, and Trudeau hated the glamourous yet boring life of being a politician’s wife, it took years for her to accept responsibility for her actions.

She didn’t have the strength to stand up to handlers who encouraged her to campaign with Trudeau in 1974 so he’d look like a sensitive man with heart, much like Conservative leader Stephen Harper is doing now wearing his “fuzzy blue” sweater in promotional ads, she said. She had to give up breastfeeding because she couldn’t take Sacha on board the cigarette smoke-filled campaign plane. But it was all for naught when Trudeau lost the election and she had to give up her job as PM’s wife.

The marriage dissolved and Trudeau got a reputation as a ditzy celebrity who was photographed partying with the Rolling Stones on the eve of the 1979 election. Unabashed, Trudeau hinted at her party-girl origins, joking: “Darn, I wish I would have slept with every single one of them to keep me in memories in my old age.”

In the end, though, she had to learn to take responsibility for her mistakes instead of blaming everything on her disease.

“It’s a choice,” she said about recovery, “It’s a strong choice you have to make. The longer you suffer, the harder it is to get out of it.”