Washington | Former US First Lady Michelle Obama said she suffers from “mild depression” due to containment due to the COVID-19 pandemic and race struggles in her country, as well as “hypocrisy” of the Trump administration.
Former President Barack Obama’s wife made the remarks in the latest episode of his podcast, which aired Wednesday on Spotify.
“I wake up in the middle of the night because something is worrying me, or because I feel a weight,” she explains. “I try to play sports, but there were times in my forties when I just didn’t feel good.”
Mrs. Obama, 56, also says she goes through “these emotional ups and downs that everyone feels.” Moments “during which we do not recognize each other”.
“This is not a time when we flourish, spiritually,” she adds. “I know I am going through a form of mild depression.”
“Not just because of my forties, but also because of race struggles. And to see this administration, to see its hypocrisy, day after day, is demoralizing ”.
The United States has been the scene of unprecedented anti-racism protests in recent months, sparked by the death of black forty-something George Floyd in late May below the knee of a white police officer.
Michelle and Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, remained in Washington after leaving the White House in January 2017.
The former First Lady also said in her podcast that it was “exhausting” to “wake up and see yet another new story about a black man or black person being dehumanized, injured, killed ( e) or falsely accused of something ”.
“And that leads to a burden that I haven’t felt for a while in my life,” she says.
“We are at a unique moment in our history,” she says again. “We are going through something that no one in our lifetime has experienced”.