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We talk very little about mental health. And when we do, we always focus on the patient, their needs and difficulties. Of course, they are the first to have a hard time, but for families it is also very difficult, because we do not have the tools or education necessary to understand what is happening," says Sol Macaluso, one of the journalists who put a face to the war in Ukraine last year as a correspondent for Telecinco for 76 long days. Now he has just given visibility to another hard story, that of his life and childhood in the shadow of a mother with bipolar disorder in the most advanced degree of the three possible types – "That means that his periods of stability are very brief, because his brain oscillates between the manic pole and the depressive one very often." Explains-. He has done so through a book, 'Mom's War' (ed. HarperCollins), in which he tells what it is like to live marked by the monster of mental illness.
"My life, and my mother's, has been a constant rollercoaster, because you never know when that damn monster is going to appear, as I baptized it when I was just a five-year-old girl and I didn't understand what was happening. We all have a special relationship with our mothers, much more, even if you are a woman. She is the one who helps you, advises you and accompanies you, who waits for you every day with the food on the table. But mine couldn't, I didn't have that figure. When I was just a child, I dressed myself, I woke up alone, I cooked alone... I had to acquire a maturity that did not correspond to me."
Sol began to ask herself questions from a very young age, "maybe that awakened my vocation to be a journalist, because I always had many and curiosity to answer them," she reflects. But it took him a while to be aware of what was happening. "When I went to my friends' houses I realized that things were very different from what I lived every day. They had no responsibilities, they were not obliged to wake up their mothers to take their medicine, to pay the electricity bills when they were eight or nine years old, to do the shopping and handle cash, to clean and fix the clothes ... I did it regularly and I thought it was super funny, because it made me feel like an adult without being one. For me it was the only reality that existed, I didn't question it because I didn't know anything else."
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It was in adolescence that he began to understand it. And she had to find out on her own; Although her mother's condition was diagnosed, neither her father nor her sister, six years older, ever told her about the disease. "He was always working and chose to keep quiet as a strategy, because the things we say out loud become more real, and the things that are not told seem to not exist. Their way of protecting us was to hold on to the 'It's okay, if we don't talk about it, it doesn't happen.' It generated more questions, more doubts, more anguish. But now I understand: if for me as a daughter it has been difficult, for him as a husband too. Even more, accompanying a person with a mental illness and choosing them every day, not leaving them alone, is an act of love. The greatest example of love I've ever seen in my life is in my house, every day."
Her sister's way of dealing with it was to leave the house, "she was never there." That of Sol, living all the time with the absence of his mother even if she was present. "I encountered situations that made me feel a lot of guilt. I thought, 'No matter what I do, no matter how good a daughter she is, I'm never going to be the one my mother wants.' It hurt a lot, because I saw that my friends shared everything with their mothers and that they accompanied them a lot. And it didn't happen to me. Maybe my father was with me, but it was not the same or what I saw happening to others. I constantly wondered why. Why me, why my mom, why doesn't she love me?"
The turning point came when Sol turned 21, in 2016. "I didn't know how to handle the anguish, or how to set limits or accompany my mother..., I lacked tools and I sank. I had a suicide attempt." It was a before and after; A therapist and a psychiatrist came into his life. "For the first time I can put into words what happened to me, I was able to explain it to myself and see that it made sense. Something clicked in my head and I understood, looking back at my childhood and adolescence, that my mother was not a bad person, far from it. On the contrary, something that can be as simple for us as getting out of bed and being in pajamas in the living room, for her is a huge effort."
With time and therapy the answers came." My mother is not making my life impossible, it's not that she doesn't love me, she has a disease and that's why she acts like that, but nobody has explained it to me. When you realize that she actually loves you with all her heart and does what she can with the chips she has, that's when you stop comparing her to the mother of others or the one you'd like to have and accept her as she is. You can understand her and empathize with her, because she also has a very bad time. I started putting myself in her shoes and that allowed me to see her differently, and me too. Now I know that I can help from my place, accompanying and accepting the helplessness of not being able to do more for someone you love. My mother was, in her own way and with her things; I was as I could be."
Antonio Heredia
Breaking the taboo
Since 2021 Sol's mother has not had any hospital admission, "she is stable, which given her condition is an extremely good concept," she tells us. He has read his daughter's book and allowed her to publish it, despite "the shame I felt, because of the prejudice and taboo surrounding mental illness, what they will say. But I told him that our story could help other people who felt lost, as I did at the time, people who need a book like this."
Because Sol Macaluso does not tell his story from the position of victim or from a place where he feels sorry for how his childhood and adolescence have been. "On the contrary, what I want is for people to empathize more with people like my mother, because I've seen how she has been left out for being different, and that also hurts a lot." Its objective is "to talk about mental health, to know other types of stories and other points of view different from that of the patient, in this case that of a daughter. And above all, that this book helps; If it serves only one person, it will be enough. We have felt very alone. And it's very hard; Doctors subject family members to questionnaires and questions that stir you, hurt you and distress you, because bipolar disorder is very difficult to diagnose being only a couple of hours with the patient."
All in all, she claims to be the woman she is thanks to what she has lived with her mother. "I owe patience and respect to her. In my book I make a lot of parallels between what I experienced at home and what I saw in Ukraine. There I realized how important empathy is to tell such raw and cruel stories. If I hadn't been able to empathize with the Ukrainians behind the camera, I wouldn't have been able to tell their stories either. It made me aware of all those tools that I have been acquiring without knowing it over the years and that, in the end, I have put into practice in my work."
Sol was the face and voice of Telecinco in Ukraine from April to September last year – "the body asked me for a pause". Now she is looking for work and demands to talk more about mental health, to get her out of the closet definitively. "When someone has cancer or needs blood we pass the message to each other, we have volunteers and everyone around turns over. But when what he tells you is that he has depression or anxiety, what is bipolar ... then the opposite happens. There the answer is don't get together, you crazy whore, bipolar ... This expression is frivolous. Bipolarity is not changing your mind, I wish it were. It is a very serious disorder that profoundly affects the patient and their environment. You have to talk about these things, name them and stop feeling ashamed. We can help others a lot just by learning to listen."
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