Margaret Trudeau

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.

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.

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.

Do you know what prepares you for the mental hospital? Being a prime minister's wife.

Oh, am I a feminist? I usually say that I was an accidental feminist. Really, I was just being me.

I tried to be a good wife, but I was lost in my gilded cage.

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.

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.