Former First Lady Michelle Obama said this week that she is suffering from a “low-grade depression” because of the coronavirus pandemic, racial tensions in the U.S., and the Trump administration’s responses to both.
“I’m waking up in the middle of the night because I’m worrying about something or there’s a heaviness,” Obama said in her “The Michelle Obama Podcast” on Wednesday.
“I try to make sure I get a workout in, although there have been periods throughout this quarantine, where I just have felt too low,” she claimed.
Obama then described the “emotional highs and lows that I think everybody feels, where you just don’t feel yourself.”
It is “exhausting” to be “waking up to yet another story of a black man or a black person somehow being dehumanized, or hurt, or killed, or falsely accused of something,” she said.
And it is just as troubling to see how many Americans refuse to wear face masks, she complained.
“There’s almost like there’s a limit to our sacrifice and it was about a month and then we just got tired of the virus,” she said.
“That’s been disheartening to see so many people who have grown tired of staying at home because the virus didn’t impact them.”
The former First Lady then slammed the Trump administration, claiming that “watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting.”
“These are not, they are not fulfilling times, spiritually,” she said. “I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression.”
Additionally, she used the platform to suggest that the pandemic had reopened the discussions about “wealth redistribution” that her husband’s presidency had initiated.
The classification of many low-wage service employees as “essential workers” should lead others to reflect on their value to the workforce.
“That’s a part of that reflection, that we need to do, you know—with ourselves, and, and as a community.” Obama said, according to Breitbart.
“And we have to think about that, in terms of how wealth is distributed,” she continued. “You know, how, how these essential people are supported.”
Since leaving the White House, Obama has pursued multiple projects, including publishing a memoir, releasing a documentary film series, and now hosting a Spotify podcast that dives into politically-related issues.
But Democrats have another task for her in mind: running alongside Joe Biden for the White House this year.
A group of activists is pushing Biden’s campaign to ask Obama to be his running mate, arguing that her political clout would be a sure guarantor that Biden would win in November.
With Biden’s own cognitive decline already a focal point of the campaign, it is unclear, however, whether Michelle Obama’s self-professed mental-health issues could raise any red flags.
If so, it would not be the first time that a vice-presidential running mate’s depression had cost Democrats the election.
During the 1972 campaign, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern was swept by incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon, with many blaming the controversy surrounding original vice-presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton’s history of receiving clinical electro-shock therapy as being a deciding factor.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
