After the first confinement, a quarter of the French surveyed suffered from anxiety disorders. In 2020, the number of suicide attempts among those under 15 years of age doubled while nearly 20% of Covid-19 patients had psychological sequelae several months after the inflammatory peak. Apart from the pandemic, mental illnesses affect every year in France, one in 5 people, or 12 million people.
Finally, 30% of hospital practitioner positions in psychiatric services remain vacant. “
These figures have the advantage of providing an effective picture of a worrying situation. For more than ten years, professionals have sounded the alarm bells but it is the pandemic that has made the emergency on mental health in France audible. First, because the whole country – and even the whole world – is confronted with anxiety in the face of death or confinement and no longer only people considered “fragile”. Then because the inflammation linked to Covid-19 has direct consequences on the mental health of patients.
Mental illnesses are illnesses that should be treated like others and with others. It would seem that in France, we had barely realized this.
Guest: Marion Leboyer is a psychiatrist, professor of psychiatry at the University of Paris-Est-Créteil. Head of the Psychiatry and Addictology division of Henri-Mondor university hospitals (Créteil) as well as of the Translational Psychiatry laboratory at Inserm. She also runs FondaMental, the foundation she created that works on Mental Health. She is the author of several essays, including a reference book, Psychiatry, the state of emergency, published in 2018 and co-authored with Pierre-Michel Llorca… and co-author with Lisa Letessier and Anne de Danne, of an essay entitled “ Reinventing our mental health with Covid-19 ”recently published by Odile Jacob editions.
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