“Being happy is dangerous”: bipolar life according to Nicolas Demorand and Gérard Garouste
Interview : With his recent bestseller, "Interior Night," journalist Nicolas Demorand has broken the taboo surrounding bipolar disorder. Painter Gérard Garouste already discussed his own condition fifteen years ago in "The Unquiet." We brought them together for an exclusive conversation in the artist's studio.
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"It's an absolutely incredible psychedelic experience, finding yourself in sheets of color, being projected into one of your paintings," Nicolas Demorand says to Gérard Garouste, who smiles at him, astonished. As a quarter of a century and medical revolutions separate them, the star journalist tries to describe to the famous painter the effects of ketamine spray, a new treatment for resistant depression, after Garouste tells him about Marplan, this ancestral and heavy molecule which, at the beginning of his bipolar life, made him (even more) sick. Both are sitting next to a canvas, the painter's last, where we see a man clutching his pink and wrinkled brain with both hands. In bipolar disorder , the diagnosis that unites the two men, the brain alternates between phases of depression and manic excitement.
On this last day of May, the 54-year-old journalist and the 79-year-old painter meet in Garouste's studio in Normandy. They get along well, but are as opposite as the phases they go through. Nicolas Demorand wrote "Intérieur nuit" (Les Arènes), a powerful, precise, and factual text about his journey as a bipolar patient. He presents the France-Inter morning show as a master of clocks and immaculate black T-shirts. Gérard Garoust…
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