The mood swingswho attack the bipolar people are as brutal as the weather changes at altitude. Sometimes the sun shines and a feeling of euphoria, excitement and well-being radiates the person and those around him. Sometimes the sky darkens with threatening clouds and is adorned with melancholy, despair or worse,suicidal thoughts.
These mental oscillations, Melissa Spitz knows them well. She saw them daily through her mother, who was diagnosed with bipolar when she was just six years old. She grew up with her mother Deborah, trying somehow to keep her footing in the face of her mother’s mental instability. In addition to this mental disorder, the latter learns that she is suffering from cancer and must then undergo heavy radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments. Fragility and hard knocks get the better of this mother who begins to abuse alcohol and drugs. A negative spiral that will cause a divorce.
“A metaphor for what is happening in my life and vice versa”
The temptation to move away from her mother to preserve herself is there but Melissa decides otherwise. In 2009, while studying art at the University of Missouri at Columbia, she started a photographic project whose model would be her mother and her daily life with her bipolar disorders.
Like a need to exteriorize what is on her heart, the young girl captures her mother’s pendulum moods. “There’s a picture where my mum is screaming on a bench. She has pain in her voice and I was like then, This is how I feel. Suddenly it echoed. It wasn’t just about make a documentary about my mother, but to use it as a metaphor for what is happening in my life and in hers”, explains Melissa to the American site Vice.
Here we see his mother all smiles in the middle of a shopping session. There, a change of scenery, Deborah is now sitting on the ground with her hands hiding her face… The many photos invite reflection on bipolarity for patients and their entourage. Melissa’s photographic project can be seen on the Instagram account “Nothing to worry about”. It has more than 28,600 subscribers to date.
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