ANTWERP, April 17 \u2014 Just weeks after her husband won Belgium\u2019s national elections in 2024, Veerle Hegge found herself in hospital for an eating disorder that almost claimed her life.<\/p>\n
Nearly two years later \u2013 including six months of full-time treatment \u2013 Prime Minister Bart De Wever\u2019s wife shared with AFP why she chose to take her anorexia struggle public in a book that delves deep into her personal life.<\/p>\n
\u201cMental illness is still surrounded by taboo,\u201d the 53-year-old schoolteacher said in an interview at her home in the port city of Antwerp. \u201cIt\u2019s something people feel uneasy, awkward even, to talk about.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so important to get care early on when you are sick,\u201d she says, to avoid \u201cfalling in deeper.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you can only do that with help from the people around you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hegge has been De Wever\u2019s partner for three decades, through his longtime tenure as mayor of Antwerp and since he became prime minister last year, raising four children now aged 18 to 24.<\/p>\n
Entitled \u201cThe weight of silence\u201d, her book focuses largely on the months she spent in hospital treatment in 2024 \u2013 the time she needed to get back on her feet from a near-fatal battle with anorexia.<\/p>\n
A striking scene recounts her hour-long car journey to a clinic in eastern Belgium \u2013 with De Wever in stony silence at the wheel \u2013 after it became clear getting full-time specialist help had become a matter of \u201csurvival.\u201d<\/p>\n
De Wever\u2019s Flemish conservatives had just won the national election, and he was tipped for prime minister.<\/p>\n
His wife remembers thinking he must be \u201cdisappointed\u201d in her \u2013 but not daring to ask. At home, she says, everyone used to \u201ctiptoe around\u201d the matter of her illness.<\/p>\n
She describes a \u201crushed\u201d arrival at the clinic \u2013 and the shock of finding herself alone, with a psychiatric patient tag around her wrist.<\/p>\n
\u201cBart couldn\u2019t stay long \u2013 he had to get back to work as always,\u201d she writes in the book\u2019s opening pages. \u201cWe hugged briefly, and agreed to call one another. That was all. And Bart left.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hegge speaks candidly of her loneliness and guilt at being away from home \u2013 after so many years keeping family life ticking over while De Wever pursued his career \u2013 although soon enough she was able to leave the hospital at weekends.<\/p>\n
Later in the book, she writes that her husband had seemed \u201chelpless\u201d faced with her ordeal, and thanks him for sticking by her side.<\/p>\n
Buried trauma\u00a0<\/p>\n
Much of Hegge\u2019s story is devoted to her childhood \u2013 where her earliest memories are dominated by a mother prey to bouts of deep depression, whose fits of anger she grew to fear and second-guess.<\/p>\n
Home life was often marred by silence and simmering conflict \u2013 but that was not the hardest part of growing up.<\/p>\n
From the age of five or six, she reveals she was sexually abused by an older boy over a period of several years \u2013 a trauma she now realises she repressed until just a few years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cAccepting that truth opened the floodgates,\u201d she writes. \u201cIt had a huge impact on my body, my sense of internal balance.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEighteen months later I was admitted to intensive care for an advanced eating disorder,\u201d she says \u2013 the first of two episodes that would culminate with her hospitalisation the year of the election.<\/p>\n
Hosting AFP\u2019s team in her family living room, in a comfy pullover and sneakers, Hegge says she is doing better.<\/p>\n
Since her book hit the shelves \u2013 in French last month, after an initial release in Dutch last year \u2013 she says she has received countless messages of support.<\/p>\n
Among those reaching out are people battling eating disorders themselves, or supporting loved ones as they struggle, who thank her for tackling the painful topic head-on.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the people I see cling on to me, or start to cry,\u201d she told AFP. \u201cThere is so much pain and suffering.\u201d \u2014 AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ANTWERP, April 17 \u2014 Just weeks after her husband won Belgium\u2019s national elections in 2024, Veerle Hegge found…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[8029,19,76,7,8058,8057,8028],"class_list":["post-11935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-belgium","tag-anorexia","tag-antwerp","tag-bart-de-wever","tag-belgium","tag-flemish-conservatives","tag-the-weight-of-silence","tag-veerle-hegge"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/116423126270126050","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}