ReportageIn Kremlin-Bicêtre, in Val-de-Marne, a service operating almost unique in France can immediately hospitalize young people in crisis. But, because of the upheavals caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, caregivers are overwhelmed, and an alert has been sent to the regional health agency. “Le Monde” spent a week in this unit.
Yassine (all the children’s names have been changed) holds Clémentine in her arms. The tall teenager with childish features grinned, stunned at the ease with which he hugged this pretty 14-year-old girl, barely arrived. “You are in the hospital, there, not in a dating club”, plague Doris (who did not wish to give her name), the caregiver, crossing the living room of the Emergency and Child Psychiatry Liaison Unit (Ulpij) of the Fondation Vallée, located in the heart of the Kremlin-Bicêtre (Val-de-Marne), and in which The world was able to spend a week. Yassine and Clémentine are both there for suicide attempts; one swallowed two boxes of anxiolytics the morning of his white bac, the other overdosed on ecstasy.
Each year, nearly a hundred children and adolescents stay in this unique service in the Paris region, capable of “To operate in a real emergency and to hospitalize a young person in one hour, in a space designed for that, explains Doctor Hugo Naudet, doctor of the unit. Here, we recover the worst situations, but I have never had so many requests for completely catastrophic cases. We have to constantly find solutions, we only have eight places. ” Ulpij aggregates all the adolescent distress aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has increased domestic abuse, desocialization, time in front of screens and suicidal thoughts. And since December 2020, “The troubles are blazing”, says Doctor Naudet.
At the same time, the unit had to alert the Regional Health Agency (ARS) for reinforcements. “The two confinements were initially rather well lived by many adolescents, who seem to have found themselves in a period of“ pseudo-comfort ”in connection with the school dropout. However, what follows will show that this lull was only temporary, and there will be an explosion of psychiatric decompensations and crisis situations among adolescents at the end of 2020 ”, corroborates the activity report of the unit published in early 2021. This service, like other similar structures in France, fears an epidemic of self-harming acts among young people.
Cut off from the world for two weeks
Two doctors, three interns, ten nurses, six orderlies and a psychologist take turns day and night to watch over these children cut off from the world and locked up in the unit for two weeks on average. They then joined the city child psychiatry circuit, also weakened by the health crisis and the lack of practitioners. The patient lists of medico-psycho-educational centers are saturated, with sometimes a year of waiting to see a caregiver. “The fragility of the care fabric downstream means that young people on the wire switch more quickly, accutiser [passent d’un état chronique à un état aigu], and no longer land in the emergency room. It’s a vicious circle “, explains Dr Richard Buferne, head of the intersectoral pole at the Fondation Vallée, to which Ulpij is attached.
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