Faced with academic pressure, high school students in burnout

Lise (some high school students requested anonymity) fears an anxiety attack. Wednesday, May 11 and until the 13, this final year student will take the specialty tests, which count for a third of the baccalaureate mark. Even if she has been better for a few months, the Lyon high school student is afraid of a relapse at the worst time. After a second year complicated by “toxic relationships” with other students, she has an anxiety attack in the middle of homework on the table, at the start of first class. “I had a black hole and hot flashes, I kept repeating to myself that I was not going to make it. I left the room shaking in the middle of the test, I had lost all my means “remembers the young girl.

Lise is having a chaotic first year, regularly feeling unwell during assessments, to the point of having difficulty passing them. She clings and continues despite everything to go to class. The transition to hybrid teaching – one day of high school lessons, one day of distance learning, due to the Covid-19 epidemic – and the unreplaced absence, for several months, of its specialist teacher history-geography, geopolitics and political science do not calm his apprehensions, quite the contrary. “I cried every night, I couldn’t get it out of my head that I was going to miss the baccalaureate. Fortunately, both my teachers and my parents were benevolent”, she says. Since December 2021, she has been climbing the slope thanks to the psychologist who has been following her since the second, but she still feels fragile and remains under anxiolytics.

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Lise is one of the high school students in school burnout. The term does not always achieve consensus and the phenomenon, characterized by exhaustion, a loss of meaning and motivation in the face of chronic stress, is difficult to quantify as the indicators are lacking, but the national education staff are formal: high school students are more prone than before to anxiety, crying spells, even depression or school phobia.

If multiple factors are taken into account in the ill-being of adolescents, “performance anxiety”as psychologists call it, is not to be neglected.

ocean of uncertainties

“This year, thirty students out of 1,200 benefit from an IAP [projet d’accueil individualisé] with course releases, because they can no longer manage everything. Three years ago, there were barely ten.notes Franck Antraccoli, headmaster in Nantes and general secretary of the ID-FO principals’ union. “The queues in front of our infirmaries are increasing, and we are unable to meet all the requests”worries Saphia Guereschi, nurse in national education and general secretary of Snics-FSU, while there are only 7,700 school nurses in France.

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