Solar on screen, Agathe Lecaron lets nothing of her anxieties show. Yet, the 52-year-old host has suffered from severe hypochondria for more than twenty years – an illness which affects nearly 8 million people in France. The presenter of Well and good together I already consecrated a titled book to myself Patient zero, in which she talks about her fight against this mental disorder that is still underestimated by society. “This hypochondria characterizes me so much that at one point, it had to come out. Afterwards, diving back into it remains ambivalent, because initially, there was a real trauma,” she confided in an interview granted to Madame Figaro. And to add: “It’s a bourgeois mental illness, it must be said. I have the luxury of self-analyzing, self-palpating, consulting everywhere. And besides, The only time anxiety goes away is when something really bad happens around me.”
“It’s very strange”: Agathe Lecaron confides in her “total amnesia” from her college years
During his childhood, school was “a valve”confides Agathe Lecaron in an interview given to La Tribune Sunday. “I felt out of step, but I very quickly understood that by making others laugh I created a bond. So I used humor at school and then at home with my parents, whom I didn’t see happy together. Making them laugh created a form of cohesion, and it nourished me a lot, she continues. And then, as an only child, I always felt very alone. I kept a real part of darkness for myself. I pretended, I adapted, while deep down I didn’t feel concerned by the same things as the other children.” Torments that she didn’t necessarily talk to her parents about, because“They weren’t really there.”
In this same interview, Agathe Lecaron explains that she has no memory of her college years. “total amnesia”, she declares. Before continuing: “I don’t remember any faces, any shared moments. Was there a trauma? Honestly, I don’t know. It wasn’t a happy time because I was searching for myself a lot. But this absence of memories remains very strange.”
How does Agathe Lecaron avoid passing on her anxieties to her children?
In this context, Agathe Lecaron also fears passing on her anxieties to her children. “It’s clear that my eldest is already a bit of a hypochondriac,” she revealed in the columns of Madame Figaro. But the mother does the best she can to protect them from her own suffering. “Our role is to try to break these patterns for our own children. I’m just trying to be a ‘good enough’ mother to not repeat certain mistakes.” she declares in The Tribune on Sunday. “When my two sons ask me what there is after death, I tell them: ‘I don’t know.’ As a child, since I had no answers, I always imagined the worst. I grew up in a very Catholic education, with a lot of guilt, the idea of sin, of hell… I think the source of my anxiety also comes from there.”
