Fgiven the massive expansion of suicidal gestures among adolescents and pre-adolescents, between 2019 and 2021, certified by Public Health France (Analysis of continuously monitored indicators, February 7, 2022), the pediatric and child psychiatry departments are overwhelmed. In France, in 2022, children and adolescents, particularly very young girls, die of psychological suffering due to lack of care and societal consideration.
The silence that followed the objectification of this major health problem speaks volumes about the indifference mixed with powerlessness of a society conscious of exposing its youth to despair. The impact of the Covid is an explanation that is often put forward in a somewhat simplistic way. But psychiatry, a place of reception of psychic suffering, offers a broader point of view.
For us who care for adolescents, complex and cumulative causes were already identifiable before the pandemic. Suicide attempts by young people were already increasing in France, and the suicide rate in the general population was above most European countries (Public health France, Weekly epidemiological bulletin, 05/02/19).
The consequences of Covid-19
Multifactorial, these causes of the psychological suffering of young people are revealed during care, at the individual, family and societal level. Covid-related restrictions have hampered adolescents’ craving for extra-familial exploration. Symptoms related to fear and control (phobias, anorexia, somatizations, etc.) particularly increased during this period of withdrawal.
The management of the Covid has thus reinforced a societal trajectory already well underway in the direction of the reduction of opportunities to meet with a human being, under the effect of algorithms and the mass computerization of personal services, which today extend to care.
However, the weakness of the social fabric (family support and social integration) is a major prognostic factor in suicidal problems. Its fragility in France as well as the feeling of isolation of young people were already well identified in the sociological analyzes of suicide, in particular in comparison with the countries of southern Europe, as the study shows. « Loneliness in France 2020 of the Fondation de France.
Basic needs other than material
Since 2010, virtual relationships have taken precedence over physically embodied social relationships. Since 2020, alongside the strengthening of these distances, adolescents have shown a clear upsurge in symptoms of “derealization”signs of overflow of an ego overwhelmed by stress until it no longer inhabits its body or reality.
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