Suddenly I turned 65 and realized, 'Oh my goodness, I'm old.' I think it was when I got into the movie theatres cheaper.

I tend to keep the press at a distance, you know, and I don't really react to what they say. I react to what I feel more.

I don't think I'm marriage material, to tell you the truth. I'd be a bad choice. But I'd be darling at being a girlfriend.

I'd studied acting in New York when I left Pierre - that was the big thing that I did. I worked very hard at it, actually.

Being bipolar is a huge exaggeration of your emotions. You can be pretty high and also terribly low, so I've been through it all.

I was so surprised, astonished, when I lost my mind, because I didn't think that I ever would. I assumed I would always be just fine.

I've had so many rich, rich, beautiful things happen to me in my life because I do have energy, and I do reach out, and I stretch my eyes.

A truly empowered woman turns her values into verbs. She understands what she values most, and she takes steps to bring that value to life.

Mania is the most destructive of the forces. Everybody around you will tell you you're in trouble, and you can't hear what they are saying.

I'm not really part of the Internet world, my age a factor in that and a lack of interest in sharing with so many, so little, so much, so often.

I strongly believe that privacy is one of the biggest luxuries one can have in life - to have your own private world and not be invaded by the outside.

The problem with mental illness, as opposed to physical illness, is that it involves wrong thinking or impaired insight. You're not thinking correctly.

My life has been extreme. Most people will not have the experience I've had. But the things that changed me, really changed me, they happen to everyone.

Everywhere I go, particularly when there's people who know me or recognize me, I get the warmest hugs and happiest sighs full of hope and full of relief.

The first thing that happens to someone with a mental illness, in the throes of it, is that they lose all their self-esteem. They don't think they fit in.

I certainly don't have all the answers, but I know this to be true: we have a great degree of control over what happens to us in the last third of our lives.

You can't fix yourself out of a mental health issue. You can't wake up and say, 'Today I'm not being depressed!' It's a process to get well, but there is recovery.

The label 'wife of the prime minister' is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I'm a human being.

I had no idea there was such a thin line between sanity and insanity. I got pushed right to the edge by tragedy in my life, and I couldn't stand up; I couldn't recover.

Depression is 80 per cent of my condition, and 10 per cent is mania, and 10 per cent is what we call normal. I say that must be when I am buying groceries. Or vacuuming.

I think our jobs as parents is to raise our children with empathy - to figure out who this little character is, almost from birth, and then guide them to fulfill their best potential.

Canadians know me so well - I am part of Canada's collective memory - and my fame would get people through the door who would not otherwise be interesting in talking about mental health.

When we have healthy children, we have a healthy community. They can learn. They can play. They can be part of the future. They can help you all do very well and prosper instead of suffering.

I was pregnant and nursing most of the years I was at 24 Sussex. I was ill-prepared and hardly even knew my husband, let alone how I was supposed to fit into this world that was very alien to me.

I don't care about the respect of the press or the public or anybody. Whose respect every day I'm trying to garner is the respect of my children and my grandchildren and my friends, the people I work with.

When you're mentally ill, sometimes you're so self-involved that you forget how much you're hurting all the people around you who love you so much, because you don't understand that you've got to get help.

The secret is to nip any mental disorder in the bud. As soon as you're not feeling yourself, reach out and get some help because you can quickly get better. If you get stuck in it, it's so hard to get out.

My honesty about mental illness has helped open a door for real conversation, and I think Justin wants to continue that conversation. He has put no restrictions on me. His father couldn't. Why should he try?

Pierre was an extraordinary teacher - he really was one of the best, and he raised the boys so, so well: to have a global view, to have compassion, to be humanitarians, to really be concerned about alleviating suffering.

I know it will blow minds, but I plan on finding an apartment in New York. I'll commute to Ottawa, so I can still be Pierre Trudeau's wife and the mother of our three children - but I also want to be a working photographer.

There was imbalance with my first husband just by the given of our 29-year age difference and the difficulty of me being this unformed, enthusiastic young woman and he already completely in place being the leader of the country.

Don't feel badly when you take off work to go for a run, to go for a walk; don't feel badly to take time to play with your children, to be part of their lives. Work is important, but you can't work at your best unless you're a whole person.

I tried during the 1974 campaign to show my husband not as the aloof intellectual people think he is, but the warm, passionate man I know. But the day after the election - after I'd worked so hard - I was put back on the shelf. I was devastated.

With my children, balance was everything: being not just a workaholic, not only studying but taking time to renew and restore yourself and taking time to pay attention to your brain health and not assume, as we all do, that our brains are perfect.

We can choose to wake up and grumble all day and be bitter and angry and judge others and find satisfaction in others doing bad instead of good. Or we can we wake up with optimism and love and say, 'Just what is this beautiful day going to bring me?'

I was a quicksilver girl who saw every leaf on every tree. For me, there was no middle ground between sinking and flying, and once I was into my early adult years, my roller coaster got wilder and faster: I seemed to rise and fall with the same reckless velocity.

Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s, I was often capricious and temperamental, quick to laugh, even quicker to feel despair, prone to flailing my arms, pouting and crying when things didn't go my way, or I thought something was unfair, or I was bullied by my sisters.

You need community support. You're pretty defeated when you're laid low with a mental illness. It's a frightening place to be, and to get up and be able to stand and to move forward and to start functioning again, you need so much support. You need to feel you're not alone.

I don't paint, and I can't draw, but I see things, I think, quite well, and I love being able to freeze things with the camera, particularly the children. Then I discovered with the camera that you can tell a whole story with just freezing a moment in reality. I find it a very good way, a very satisfying feeling.

I remember, after my first postpartum depression, I didn't know what had happened to me. I was stuck in this gray depression where I just wanted to retreat and pull the covers over my head and weep. My mother and I, we went to a psychiatrist, and he just patted me on the head and told me I had baby blues, which was not helpful, obviously.

The main thing that triggered my depression was my isolation that was imposed on me by becoming the wife of the prime minister, and leaving my home, my family. I was young, very young, and very naive and very hopeful and enthusiastic about my wonderful new life, but it was the loneliness and the lack of being able to properly relate to people.

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