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AFP, published Saturday 21 November 2020 at 13:48
The inability to see the end of the tunnel, loneliness, professional concern. Coronavirus, imprisonment, and even the terrorism that continues to strike, throw many French people into deep unease: depressive syndromes have doubled in a few weeks.
“What’s difficult is accumulation. There has been too much this year,” says Marie, 43. This Parisian, mother of two, feels she is “on the verge of rock”. “It intensifies on returning from All Saints’ holidays” with the reconfirmation, the terrorist assassination of Professor Samuel Paty, the Nice attack.
With her husband, a general practitioner, she follows the Covid figures in an “almost obsessive” way. But at home he tries to talk only about positive things: “Otherwise I will screw up”. This senior executive has “struggled to work, to find pleasure” for ten days. “Everything is hard work: taking care of the children, celebrating birthdays, Skypeing with friends. I have a feeling of suffocation.”
Discomfort, depression and even depression are gaining ground. On Thursday, Health Minister Olivier Véran noted that mental health has “significantly deteriorated”. Between late September and early November, the number of people in a depressive state doubled, from 10 to 21 percent according to Public Health France.
Already during the first birth and in the following months, the consumption of anxiolytics and sleeping pills increased, with almost 1.6 million additional treatments delivered in 6 months compared to the expected level.
“We want to avoid a third wave, which would be a wave of mental health,” said Olivier Véran during a visit to “Fil santé jeunes”, a listening device for 12-25 year olds. The students are particularly impressed.
– “Resources are running out” –
On the forum of this platform, a request for help: “Soon I will be 21 and the time I spent on earth already seems too long”. The imprisonment “has only made things worse, my future, if I have one, is more than uncertain (…), I realize how lonely I am, absolutely nobody takes my news The worst thing is that I had to come back from my parents.
If the children seem more protected, Julie saw her 10-year-old daughter sink. “When his day center closed during the holidays because the director had Covid, I started to see tics appear,” says the mother of the family.
But the change took place on the day of the beginning of the school year, marked by wearing the mask for schoolchildren and paying homage to Samuel Paty. The same evening, the girl had a panic attack: “We will not get out”. His tics got worse and it triggered “something like Tourette’s syndrome”. The usually calm child began to insult his mother, to make incoherent words, to scream in his room.
Now she is being followed by a psychologist and will consult a neurologist. “The context, it made it spin,” describes Julie.
The Red Cross receives around 300 calls a day, three times more than a year ago. The words keep coming back. Rosine Duhamel, head of the psychological support center, noticed a few words from the callers. “I didn’t want to relive a confinement. (…) I don’t see the end of it, I don’t know if one day things will go back to the way they were before and this scares me terribly”.
Loneliness weighs a lot. “Silence, when you are alone, it is like a noise,” said one of them.
In another line, Suicide Listen, a man with respiratory failure shared his thoughts of suicide. “I drink more and more after giving birth. I’m disgusted.” “Terrified” to capture Covid, he never comes out. “What’s the point of continuing like this?” She asked.
“With repetition and duration, the resources to adapt are exhausted,” explains Rosine Duhamel. “And when the defense mechanisms break, we risk falling into a depressive state. This is what we see today.”
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