“I really wanted to convey a positive message” on bipolarity, assures the comedian. “Say: yes, okay, it’s a terrible illness, but you can live with it. Bipolar disorder affects a million people in France, and it can go very well when you’re stable.”
Constance says that at the very beginning, she was “far from thinking that she was bipolar”. “I was just ‘tired’, officially. That’s the principle of burnout: you feel like you’re over-efficient, and when you fall, you tell yourself that you’re very tired, and you have sentences that go round and round in your head: I got stuck on the fact that I didn’t even have time to do laundry, so I told myself ‘I don’t have time to wash my underwear, I don’t have time to wash my underwear’. It sounds funny, but in fact it’s a vicious circle.”
“GPs told me I was just tired”
“There is a kind of popular opinion that when you work in entertainment, it’s all about fun.”regrets the actress. “But in fact, it’s a lot of work behind it. And as long as we haven’t admitted that it’s burnout or depression, we’re in denial, we try to force it… For a very long time, I thought it was weakness, in fact: I told myself ‘me, no’. GPs told me that I was just tired, that I had to do yoga, etc. And it was a friend who told me: ‘listen, I’m depressed, I take medication, otherwise it’s dangerous, I’ve already attempted suicide’. I told myself that medication confuses the brain, that it’s for the weak… And no, in fact. It’s an illness and you absolutely have to get treatment, otherwise it can be fatal, really.”
Constance reminds us: “It’s very difficult, physically and mentally, to get through it. I’ve never known a worse pain, an ordeal as terrible as depression. I was the first to tell my mother, who had been depressed for years: shake it off. It’s terrible to say that. And until you’ve been through it, you can’t understand. Depression hurts physically: you feel like you’ve been beaten with an iron bar. You can’t move, breathe, look up, eat, think. You have no more life force, you’re dead inside.”
She herself has attempted suicide four times, and she says so clearly: “I want to talk about it because suicide is not cowardice, it is not selfishness, it is a symptom. We have to stop putting all this shame around attempted suicide, there is nothing more violent. There are people who stopped talking to me because they found it unforgivable: do we tell someone who has cancer to stop blackmailing or hurting people?”
