Posted May 22
When I was 14, I wanted to kill myself. Despite Jean Leloup and The Cranberries in my ears, the cheerful friendships, the volleyball gang, the ski gang, the student newspaper, the first sentimental emotions and my privileges as a young girl from the wealthy middle class. Alas, I get bored quickly. I rumbled, I boiled, I drifted. Then, for many reasons too long to explain, I imploded. It happened towards the end of my third high school. I remember panic attacks in class in front of incredulous looks, stays in the infirmary, then, finally, this full-time retreat for several months in my teenager’s room, my neighbors who brought me my homework , of my impossible outings while from my window, the din of other teenagers attracted me in vain. In 1992, the word “depression” did not attach to youth. We were just starting to talk about burnout and that only concerned the adult world at work. So I had to wait for it to pass with Enya tapes, breathing techniques, valerian herbal teas and trips to Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine. Already, the health system was overloaded. No specific suicide plan, just the skin inside out on my body, I came back home every time. Still, always, dark thoughts.
Then came the books.
I was already reading, of course, but never like in this period during which certain titles have become buoys launched from the top of the waves by a new friend more lit than the others, a librarian, a teacher, my mother.
In contact with the writers I was discovering, I was able to keep my head above water, find something else to live better, console my sadness, inhabit my loneliness. The words of others also allow the invention of a new life.
It was already taken.
“Coming from melancholy, literature is its fulfillment and completion. It is through melancholy that one enters literature. It is through literature that we get out of melancholy”, writes Danièle Sallenave in The gift of the dead. These are the words of my mother tongue, therefore, which have become a kind of second flesh. At the same time and unconsciously, I then had to make a pact to remain faithful to him all my life. Hence my current fight for the survival of French in Quebec.
I thought back to this period of “resurrection” by signing, at the invitation of the Union of Quebec Writers and Writers (UNEQ), the important letter published in The Press on World Book and Copyright Day, on April 23, and alongside organizations and personalities from the worlds of books, culture, literacy, education, business and health. She asked the five parties campaigning for the general elections in Quebec this year to make a commitment to make reading a national priority for at least a year.1. This request was accompanied by a request “to accompany this decision with an exceptional budget to allow a major awareness campaign and structuring projects to be carried out”. Since reading is not the sole responsibility of the Ministries of Education and Culture and Communications, since the issues related to the development of a true culture of reading are multiple and engage many ministries and organizations, the wish of the creation of a special multidisciplinary and interdepartmental committee was also issued.
At the “emergence” of two extraordinary pandemic years which will leave their mark on society – many among young people – and of which we have not yet measured the extent of the consequences, I can only reiterate my support for this request from my peers. , to insist that it be taken seriously, considering of course how much the prosperity of a society, its vitality, and, to come back to my own experience, its mental health, also depend on reading, and, by extension , by promoting our French language and our writers.
Supporting evidence
It has been proven that reading allows people in pain to find solutions or answers through awareness, that it offers letting go, comfort or relief that reduces anxiety, anguish or sadness, and sometimes “real moments of psychic well-being”, rightly writes Pierre-André Bonnet in Bibliotherapy in general medicine. The increase in book sales at home in the pandemic, the increased popularity of our authors and listening to the radio program The more the merrier, the more we readhosted by Marie-Louise Arsenault on ICI Première, which enjoyed its highest ratings in 11 years of existence, is no doubt no coincidence.
Daniel Pennac expresses it so well in like a novel “The paradoxical virtue of reading is to abstract ourselves from the world in order to find meaning in it. »
More concretely, when we know that a young worker with low literacy skills costs Quebec society an average of $200,000 in potentially lost income, including 35% in tax benefits, it goes without saying for the economist Pierre Langlois in Literacy as a source of economic growthan economic analysis carried out for the Literacy Foundation and the Solidarity Fund QFL in 2018, that it is not only the mental health of a society, but its economic health as well, which depends on its ability to read, grasp the meaning of texts.
In a more recent study revealed on May 3 by this same Literacy Foundation, among vulnerable Quebec populations, this time, Pierre Langlois noted, without much surprise, the coexistence of literacy and income issues. The high vulnerability index would reach 6% of the population aged 15 and over in Quebec, or close to 400,000 people.
“On the one hand, insufficient basic skills are an obvious obstacle to employability, salary progression as well as educational and vocational training. On the other hand, living in a situation of low income makes it almost impossible, without specific financial support, to deploy the resources and time necessary for adult learning, returning to school or professional requalification”, also underlines the study. As you can imagine, this spiral of social and economic precariousness will be even more difficult to resolve, could obviously worsen in a context of post-pandemic economic recovery issues, inflation and labor shortages.
Schopenhauer’s power
Like what, promoting reading in Quebec, making it a national priority, goes far beyond the wishes of a few lovers of literature in need of attention or the memories of a former depressed woman relieved to have found something to cling to. I have the deep conviction that several of us can guide an individual, however young, towards reading, even if it means trying more than once, groping a little before finding THE book that triggers the unconditional love, then whatever results from it in terms of proven benefits.
I remember having piqued the interest of my loud-mouthed godson, and more interested in football and cars than books, by offering him one day when he was still a teenager. The art of always being right by Arthur Schopenhauer. It sells for $4.95 in bookstores at Editions des Mille et une nuits… I had lit a flame, that, I’m sure of. He still reads today at the dawn of his thirties, with a certain penchant for philosophers and the debate of ideas. Victoire. Alas, he stands up to me…
René Lévesque said: “To be informed is to be free. That should be enough to bait a few youngsters. My mother, she took care to “hide” some sulphurous books on the famous top shelf, behind a kind of sandstone statue not too pretty. Of course, my sister and I were going to snoop around there. I will keep silent about these titles which probably do not all border on the great genius and I revealed myself enough in the introduction, but I believe that the forbidden character of the parental stratagem had worked. As adults, we still love reading. And tanning. My sister teaches in primary school, partly with literature. She buys books for her class, she triggers literary passions each year of teaching. It makes me proud of her. I became a journalist, I write, I publish. Of course, our children’s rooms are full of stories. As far as I can remember, since my depression at 14, all our storms, we have weathered them with books. All young people should have the same chance, the same right.