RECOGNIZING ONE'S DISORDERS AND COMMITTING TO CARE
Today, it's still difficult to talk about parenthood in the healthcare setting where you're seen as a patient, just as it can be difficult to discuss your illness in the places where you go for your child's follow-up care. Yet we are all one person, and for the child, that person is first and foremost their parent.
This is why engaging in care is not only an individual but also a parental process. It helps to gradually regain personal and parental balance, to understand little by little the role of the illness in one's role as a parent, to find appropriate support, and to show one's child that it is possible to take care of oneself and get better when experiencing a period of psychological vulnerability.
"In my view, recovery occurs when a person knows themselves well enough to know if they are doing well, a little less well, or if they are doing badly. It is a different relationship with oneself and with the illness. It is a way of life, a relationship with oneself in which one constantly tries to determine one's limits [...], in which possibilities have been redefined taking the illness into account but having integrated it within oneself as a parameter of one's existence (...). To recover is perhaps simply to give the illness its proper dimension in one's life and in one's identity."
Agathe Marin
Member of "Like Madmen"
Rhizome 2017