“I’m a little tired of hiding. Imelda lives with borderline disorder. This condition from which Marilyn Monroe suffered: emotional instability, low self-esteem, identity problems… And the young woman wants to stop hiding, to hide this part of herself from others.
Adèle Flaux and Jérémy Frey give voice to four “crazy”, as we used to say. An “ordinary” madness that has nothing to do with a fairy tale… Borderline, bipolar, schizophrenic, depressive, Imelda, Hana, Maximilien and Arnaud would just like to feel understood and listened to, in the face of this disease which appropriates everything in their head , all they represent. Faced with this second voice, which is also theirs, and which is very real. “I’m a normal, social person, and admittedly a little weird, but who isn’t?” Imelda says.
This quartet, who agreed to testify with their faces uncovered, recounts a way of the cross, years of suffering, an indescribable pain that lives in them without crying being enough to help them: for them, tears flow, but nothing is not evacuated.
“This world doesn’t suit me at all”
“You’re a piece of shit, you’re going to die soon,” says this small voice to Imelda that controls her emotions and causes her to have uncontrollable fits, during which she destroys the objects she values. Maximilien recounts his family’s distrust of his schizophrenia: his father convinced that he had a “hair in his hand”, his half-sister who refused to come and sleep at his house for fear that he would “harm” them, to her and her children. Arnaud, plunged into depression, no longer has any desire, any motivation, he calls himself a “spectator of his life”.
Hana has seen her bipolar disorder tip her life over the years into a sort of “mysticism.” She has “come down” for her loved ones. Hard return to reality: “Every time I left my delirium, I fell back into a very, very strong depression, because this world does not suit me at all. With La Maison perchée, which she co-founded, she found “a place of freedom”, a rallying point for people like her, Maximilien, Arnaud or Imelda. You can meet a “peer helper” there, to see and talk to “someone who really got through it, showing you a perspective you can’t see right now.”
In France, more than three million patients are treated for serious psychiatric disorders. “Diagnostic wandering,” the difficulty in recognizing symptoms, can last for years — up to eight years of waiting for bipolarity — says Pierre de Maricourt, a psychiatrist at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris. In the meantime, or rather without waiting, this documentary highlights the urgency of the inclusion of these people, those who are aware that there is an exit and those who cannot yet imagine it.