Behind a blue paper mask, hides a warm, smiling and generous woman. Marie Rose Moro welcomes us to the Maison de Solenn, the structure specializing in the care of adolescents from the Public Assistance-Hospitals of Paris that she has managed since 2008, boulevard de Port-Royal, in Paris. The timing is tight, the child psychiatrist is running after time. Author of twenty books and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Paris, Marie Rose Moro has just published the book Sexual abuse: the children have their say (Bayard, February 2021), with Odile Amblard.
A pioneer in transcultural psychiatry, she also carries out consultations to treat the children of migrants suffering from being uprooted or having difficulty adapting to their host country. A method influenced by her own story as the daughter of immigrants who fled Francoist Spain.
For The world, she looks back on her career, her childhood and her learning French in a small village in the Ardennes, her medical studies and her choice to become a child psychiatrist.
Are you worried about the situation of adolescents with the crisis we are experiencing today?
They pay a pretty high price. There is a significant increase, of the order of 30%, of seizures in adolescents. Between health restrictions, family problems, the future which is difficult to envision, situations of restrictions which, for some, echo the war that young refugees or migrants have experienced… Teenagers are going through a really difficult period. But, overall, they are holding up.
And you, what kind of childhood did you have?
I grew up in a very small farming village, near Sedan, in the Ardennes. I was only 9 months old when my parents left Franco’s Spain for France. They both came from extremely modest families in Castile. My father came to the area to work as a lumberjack and my mother looked after us at home. We were five brothers and sisters. We lived in a community of Spaniards, but there was also a community of Poles, of North Africans. Until the age of 6, I spoke mainly Spanish. It was at school that I learned, as my little friends used to say, the “French of the mistress” : the other children spoke in a more popular language and I in a more… precise French.
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