Nicolas Demorand bipolar disorder and departure from France Inter morning show, Digi Mart USA News (France): Nicolas Demorand, host of “Recto Verso” on France Inter on Saturdays and Sundays at 9:10 a.m., has spoken publicly about his bipolar disorder in an interview with Society. The radio presenter was off the air between November 2025 and August 2026, and he says he is currently going through a “mixed phase.”
“It’s like when your radio is badly tuned and crackles,” he told the magazine. “In a single day I can swing between euphoria and depression.
I don’t know at noon what state I’ll be in at 2 p.m.”
Demorand has discussed his condition openly since the publication of his book Intérieur nuit (Les Arènes) in March 2025, which he says changed everything. “The number of people who know is enormous, but it changes nothing: you keep being a patient,” he said.
In June 2026, he also spoke about mental illness and his forced commitment at the Sainte-Anne hospital on the podcast Si besoin, describing worsening crises, hallucinations and his encounters with psychiatric doctors.
In the Society interview, he also described the effect of his fluctuating health on his family. He told his two children, aged 19 and 17, about his condition as simply as he could, explaining that he was going through contrasting states of joy and sadness.
During his forced hospitalization, he was able to visit them, and they made him a coffee and talked for about an hour and a half.
He said his wife becomes most worried when she sees him accelerating, and that he prefers to be alone when he is lying on the couch during the day because he is ashamed to be in that state.
In November 2025, he had difficulty sleeping. “For days, I slept one to three hours, at most,” he said.
That month he was no longer able to continue co-hosting the France Inter morning show with Léa Salamé.
“One morning, leaving the studio after the broadcast, I remember literally staggering to Adèle Van Reeth’s office,” he recalled. Van Reeth, the station’s director, had been holding the weekly programming meeting there.
“She saw me in such a state that she asked me, ‘What’s going on?’ I said I wasn’t sleeping anymore. She said, ‘Stop, we’ll replace you tomorrow, don’t worry, stop!’ And I never returned.”
Fully aware of his condition, Demorand chose to step away from the role. “Having literally exploded in flight last year, I could not, in all responsibility, take that risk a second time with France Inter,” he said.
