Marie-Estelle Dupont is a clinical psychologist, specializing in psychopathology and neuropsychology, as well as in transgenerational psychology. She is the author of several works, including
Being parents in times of crisis
(Les éditions Trédaniel, 2023).
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LE FIGARO. - As a psychologist, you have seen the collateral damage linked to the management of the crisis on the mental health of students and children. What is this damage?
Marie-Estelle DUPONT. -
The mental health of minors had already been deteriorating for several years when Covid occurred.
Claire Hédon, rights defender since 2020 and who will leave her mandate in 2026, recalled this in a report which precisely describes the worsening of psychological and cognitive difficulties among young people, and the impoverishment of the offer, particularly in daycare and in child psychiatry.
Covid brought us to the climax of a numerical and statistical reading of health: the very standardized bureaucratic management of the pandemic, with confinements, curfews, class closures, constant changes in reception protocols, the mask at the age when we learn to speak and read, the inequality of family situations and the resources of parents to adapt to all this in an emergency have contributed to aggravating intra-family mistreatment, dropping out of school school, anxiety-depressive syndromes, suicide attempts, eating disorders, addictions, isolation and withdrawal, school phobias... I also recalled in your columns that 52% of young people had considered stopping their course during the winter of 2021 and that Necker recorded a 600% increase in child psychiatry admissions.
Public Health France figures on visits to emergency departments for suicidal acts or thoughts have increased considerably.
young women are particularly affected.
In reality, what I observed with a number of clinicians in 2020 was then relayed by the French pediatric society, the JAMA network which showed a 299% increase in suicidal intentions among those under 15, and numerous sources which confirm the major increase in the use of psychotropic drugs among minors, often with multiple prescriptions including anxiolytics, anti-depressants, methylphenidate for attention, and sleeping pills.
It is not the difficulty that makes young people sick, human beings are equipped to face problems and tragedies.
It is the loss of meaning, the feeling of being useless or too much, the paradoxical injunctions consisting of asking minors, to be good citizens, to do the exact opposite of those they need to do to become balanced adults: study, question their teachers, go out, play sports, have interactions with their peers outside the family circle, not stay behind a screen twelve hours a day, etc.
Public authorities have never questioned their algorithmic vision of health.
They ended up no longer being able to deny the extent of the damage and, at all costs, offered reimbursed sessions.
Marie-Estelle Dupont
Difficulty planning, reduced social skills and mood disorders are very present in this age group, which no one in the scientific community denies is the one who is currently doing the worst.
Not in the sense of "normal" adolescent discomfort, but with a real difficulty in projecting oneself, in constructing a healthy image of oneself and the world, and a frequent and early recourse to all kinds of violent acts on yourself or others.
Have the public authorities learned lessons from their management of the crisis? Is this mental health problem, particularly among young people, taken seriously enough?
Public authorities have never questioned their algorithmic vision of health.
They ended up no longer being able to deny the extent of the damage and, at all costs, offered reimbursed sessions.
Which, in thirty minutes, will not allow any meeting, at most to affix an acronym of TCA, ODD, ADHD, or other OCD with a roadmap proposing reeducation and molecules... Once again we wonder how to patch things up at the haste, seeming to be doing something without ever taking a step aside, on what we are truly offering to this generation, on the way in which we are - or are not - examples.
Examples which inspire and transmit, which authorize them to think and take their place, that of those who tomorrow will run society, work and educate.
I'm not saying these diagnostics aren't useful.
I say that we say too much that by hastily slapping a label and a prescription on a minor, we have done the job.
And that's wrong.
Also readMarie-Estelle Dupont: “We teach children that at the slightest risk they must cloister themselves at home!”
When I started sounding the alarm in 2020, some called me a conspiracy theorist.
Reality imploded in our offices, but it was difficult to admit.
When the statistics came to confirm the clinical observation - we can clearly see that the figure is law but that the real expertise of those who are with patients every day has no weight - the media and politicians admitted without further labeling it as an extreme right observation that young people were doing badly.
Our public health model treats (and therefore potentially mistreats) and does not treat because the technocratic vision empties health of its human dimension, and we are in the process of moving from care to treatment, in the hygienist sense of the term.
Administrative directors trained in business schools in the role of “manager” have taken the place of department heads who know the field, and therefore the needs of patients and caregivers.
All public policies for 30 years have gone in the direction of a decline in the quality of public service, without the taxpayer being able to use their money as they wish since the administration replaces the service.
Marie-Estelle Dupont
Each time the State, for 30 years, and particularly since the 2005 hospital law, interferes in a health problem that it can no longer deny, it responds with a technocratic vision which aggravates the problem.
The healthcare system should not be dismantled.
We head to a ChatGPT psychiatry, with a self-diagnosis questionnaire, a prescription sent by email and rehabilitation exercises to do online.
Where is the care?
The State must ensure that the public service as a whole is commensurate with the taxes paid.
The school like the hospital.
All public policies for 30 years have gone in the direction of a decline in the quality of public service, without the taxpayer being able to use their money as they wish since the administration replaces the service.
If the State raises the level of education, puts care back at the heart of the hospital by relieving it of its obese bureaucracy which scares away caregivers or purely and simply prevents them from working, it will do its job.
The psychological role of policies is to maintain enough justice, security, freedom and equality in society so that young people do not feel condemned even before they finish their studies.
His role does not consist of getting involved in consultation, medicine, empathy courses or whatever idea of managing a large school or consulting firm.
The problem is that the very vision that technocrats have of health, just like the anthropology which underlies psychiatry today, cannot provide the appropriate response to the malaise of young people.
If it is “com” and a big plan to reimburse behaviorism sessions, the Coué method and an increased prescription of psychotropic drugs, it is preferable that the public authorities do not get involved.
In my opinion, if the public authorities want to work to restore the mental health of young people, they must raise the level of school, provide human and material resources to the hospital, train psychiatrists correctly and in numbers, ensure that the social elevator is working again, and allowing psychology to remain a care of being and not a psychiatrization of all affects, with the only response being putting people on molecules aimed at normalizing behavior.
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The government has no business getting involved in psychology.
Politicians are not trained for this.
Let them appoint experts whose job it is to think about the policies to be implemented, school programs, early childhood care, yes.
But often decisions are made without listening to independent experts.
I firmly believe that the State has a lot to do on the sovereign and that it must simply let the people whose job it is to do their job correctly, freely, without absurd administrative tasks, and while being paid enough not to resign. or burn out, due to lack of recognition and meaning.
Let politicians play politics.
Clinicians will do clinical work.
Point.
State intrusion into health has been a source of disorder and a decline in the quality of care.
I am very wary of major campaigns supposed to free people to talk about mental health.
The clinic is by definition a confidential thing.
Display creates unhealthy effects of identification.
80% of psychological disorders in children are linked to situations of mistreatment or deficiency, whether sexual abuse, failing parents or harassment.
Marie-Estelle Dupont
However, the anthropology which currently underlies psychiatry manuals is a morbid anthropology, where any emotion is suspected of being pathological: mourning is now classified among the pathologies!
If the State wants to help young people, it should offer other training to doctors, for example.
Beyond the health crisis, we are witnessing a rise in psychiatric problems among the youngest as well as a rise in ultraviolence, well described by child psychiatrist Maurice Berger. How do you explain it? Is this the symptom of a crisis of civilization, of a loss of bearings?
Individual and collective health are closely linked.
The anthropology which has underpinned our model of society since 1945 reduces man to his material needs.
Sami Ali, great thinker of relationships and psychosomatic unity, philosopher, psychoanalyst and painter, understood this well in the 1970s. When the requirement to do, consume, show, takes the place of the imperative to think , imagine, create, bring together, then the symbolic, the link to the other, the thought give way to an ultra-individualistic competition, anxiety-provoking, despairing, and above all, terribly standardizing.
If the ideal of success is comfort and consumption as rewards for flawless performance, what about the emotional, social, spiritual needs of the being, what also about vulnerability?
We gradually move from a logic of links to a logic of domination, the other becoming an interchangeable agent, according to the objective or desire of the moment.
Also read: When the psychiatric hospital opens to love
The American model has imported, little by little, with it the denial of the difference of generations, of the sexes, of the intimate and the public, the interchangeability of beings and situations.
However, the child is a social embryo, he is under construction, with an immature brain up to the age of 25, which means that the school and the adults owe it to him to be in a posture that is both vertical and humble.
What Maria Montessori called “service authority.”
Today, we too often see adults who “give up,” who resign.
The child is entrusted to strangers from birth.
The school hides behind circulars and adults who are supposed to protect sometimes become simple “functioning officials” as was tragically reminded by the suicides of harassed adolescents who hit the headlines a few months ago.
Psychological symptoms in children cannot be reduced to biological or genetic causation.
We know that 80% of psychological disorders in children are linked to situations of mistreatment or deficiency, whether sexual abuse, failing parents or harassment.
The symptom should not be labeled with an acronym then corrected with a molecule, but perceived as the child's unfortunate expression of the discrepancy between his environment and his needs.
How many so-called ADHDers can escape medication by reducing screens, sugar and giving their child more time for dialogue and joy!
The increase in psychiatric disorders is due both to a pathogenic model of society and to a systematic psychiatrization of affect, yet the social collagen par excellence: without emotion, no survival!
We have fallen into the paradox of a society which combines the worst of liberalism - the violence of desubjectivizing indifferentiation, all history, all tradition having to be stored in the stale and useless memories of the past - and socialism.
Marie-Estelle Dupont
The explosion of aggressive behavior and suicide attempts among adolescents is attributable to this lack of differentiation between generations which means that the child in the middle of the latency period, between 6 and 11 years old, is today "overexcited", overstimulated, an age where its development is conducive to fundamental learning.
School, public spaces, the type of entertainment offered often do not respect these stages of development and they arrive in adolescence with a fragile foundation.
Our model of neo-liberal society, where the economy, therefore statistical models and “conducts” are supposed to describe the economic agent, has evacuated thought as human specificity, therefore also its resources.
And we have fallen into the paradox of a society which combines the worst of liberalism - the violence of desubjectivizing indifferentiation, all history, all tradition having to be stored in the stale and useless memories of the past - and of socialism - the intrusion of the State in the most intimate private sphere possible.
This, with the technological tools which allow the establishment of an ultra-successful control society, our phones monitoring us all day long, without it even being necessary to put police officers in the street, and the notes having invaded digital space.
Children, even more than adults, need guidelines and authority. Are we paying for a process of deconstruction that began in the 1970s?
Of course.
And even before.
From the end of the Second World War with the Americanization of society and even before, as Husserl said, when scientific positivism took the place of philosophy on the old continent.
The psychological balance of a child and an adolescent is inseparable from the quality of his human environment and the encounters he has with adults who are concerned by his needs, aware of their tasks, aware of the asymmetry of this relationship, respectful of his vulnerability, and sufficiently exemplary in their posture and behavior to have natural authority over him, without surface authoritarianism.
We do not raise a child by fear, but by confidence in a permanent balance between unconditional tenderness and respect for his person, and constant vigilance in teaching him the prohibitions, and in holding firm on the no so that he understands that his actions have consequences and that if he does not respect these structuring and protective prohibitions, he is punished.
This allows mutual trust between an adult who believes in the child's potential and a child who dares to rely on an inspiring and reassuring adult.
That's authority.
And we can clearly see how collectively, the figure of authority, the figure of the political leader, of the father, has been replaced by the
“it is forbidden to prohibit”
allowing adults to enjoy without hindrance, associated with arbitrary acts of force. coercive which are simply the law of the strongest
“that’s how it is and we don’t discuss”
.
The mental health of young people depends on adults staying in their place and devoting time to them.
Marie-Estelle Dupont
Contemporary man wanted to throw the superego into the dustbin of the past, with God, with the notion of limit, with the figure of fatherhood complementary to that of motherhood, and not identical.
We are very embarrassed!
human freedom is not the absence of constraints, and a child who encounters neither frameworks nor limits is a child abandoned to drives and impulses that he is not equipped to master, develop, sublimate.
It is up to the adult to provide the real, but also symbolic, intellectual and linguistic framework necessary for the exercise of discernment and freedom.
There is no freedom without structuring, consistent prohibitions, allowing young people to gradually gain self-confidence, to tolerate a little frustration to obtain a lot of satisfaction later.
The narcissistic imperative to do everything right away is in reality the denial of the human condition and throws young people into a dangerous dizziness.
By not being able to gradually realize themselves, they become derealized, and regress towards self-destructive forms of self-affirmation.
Because by letting schools collapse, by making consumption the horizon of happiness, by discrediting the image of the family, we have also robbed them of hope.
In a world where the gentleman is a loser, competition and the denial of otherness make relationships incredibly versatile and violent.
When we break authority, we put back in place the law of the strongest.
This is exactly the disease our democracy is currently suffering from.
How can we overcome this crisis and restore the psychological balance of children? What public policies should be implemented or, on the contrary, eliminated?
The mental health of young people depends on the fact that adults each stay in their place and devote time to them: parents first and foremost, teachers instructing them (do they still have the possibility given their training, their wages and the ideology that corrupts knowledge?);
the psychiatrist who must listen to hear, elaborate, think, meet the patient rather than treating, correcting, eliminating a symptom, taking care of the patient and not normalizing a disorder designated by an acronym which makes it possible to avoid the dimension relational and emotional care.
all this requires that these actors be respected, recognized, valued.
And that's all.
Also read: Judi Chamberlin, a patient's revolt against psychiatry
School must educate and protect.
Teachers must be trained again in traditional methods, Singapore in maths, syllabics in reading, because all the OECD countries which are influenced by Wokist deconstruction have seen their results collapse in the Pisa ranking while French high schools have abroad who retain traditional methods with a respected teacher figure and respectful of students maintain good results.
When the ideology, whatever it is, woke or Islamist, pollutes knowledge, hinders the taste for learning, stuns thought with inappropriate content, breaks fundamental biological or historical benchmarks, it damages the future adult and puts him unable to think.
We will make considerable savings if we simply offer the youngest children reception, education and care conditions congruent with their stages of development and their needs.
Marie-Estelle Dupont
Culture and education are the best immunities against violence and depression.
Parents must put reading and general culture back into leisure activities at home, sports, strict control of screens, which must not be present at night in the bedrooms.
Read to them the illustrated fables of the fountain at three years old, tales, stories of heroes, this will populate their imagination with identifying figures that will help them!
in the car take advantage of traffic jams to invent an epic, children are funny when they launch into a story, because their logic is different from ours but often powerful.
The biggest difficulty is to organize ourselves in such a way as to free up time for our children... and then talk to each other, debate, disagree but argue, look at each other, smile, laugh, all this tenderness and closeness is the best antidote emotional deficiencies which we know are major risk factors for psychological disorders.
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The State lays down the law when parents fail.
But this must go through a restoration of care which involves recognizing that the hospital laws were destructive, changing their objective, much more than through the reform of a Penal Code which will oppose violence to the violence of young people which perhaps would never have foundered if they had been educated and considered.
Human dignity seems to have disappeared from contemporary thought, as we see when societal diversions (constitutionalization of abortion) take the place of real social issues.
Helping mothers raise their children even when they are alone, protecting single mothers, yes this is a good idea for family policy because we know how the fragility of attachment bonds is decisive in drifts towards delinquency or psychiatric disorders .
Support mothers, promote early childhood staff, strengthen the workforce, properly pay those who take care of our babies and who therefore mistreat them due to lack of time because one adult cannot take care of eight babies correctly, but this is the case in public crèches, in fact for convicted adults, this seems essential to me.
It's unbearable to think that in France, in crèches, babies are not changed, not rocked, remain dirty due to a lack of qualified staff in numbers.
“The child is the builder of the adult
,” said Maria Montessori.
We will make considerable savings if we simply offer the youngest children reception, education and care conditions congruent with their stages of development and their needs.
These are cohorts of future adults who will not experience depression, no burnout, no suicide attempts.
We talk about budget and never invest in prevention.
When everything is equal, when everything is interchangeable, how can we build lasting bonds, imbued with respect, strong enough for us to disagree without being angry?
Marie-Estelle Dupont
The government can ensure, for example, through municipalities that young people have structuring activities, and that they do not hang around in groups like abandoned kittens who will find meaning in their lives in furtive and bloody actions. .
If the school teaches them to read, to count, to construct a reflection, an argument, then it will do its job so that they have sufficient self-confidence in the face of the adult world.
The State must respect parental authority as an inviolable sanctuary, because ignoring it will in no way solve the problems of communitarianism.
It is not by sliding towards a form of communism in the sense of confiscation by the State of parental authority under the cover of a neo-liberal program of course, this is the great paradox of the time, that the We will help young people to get well.
Managing through fear is also a very negative manifestation of power.
These successive governments in failure on the sovereign for 40 years speak to us of a crisis which would justify the increasing confiscation of our freedoms and our property.
It is not up to the State to tell young people what is good or bad, dangerous or acceptable.
We can clearly see how democracy fails in the technocratic drift which always ultimately has an imperialist logic, with a single version of reality, incontestable under penalty of being treated as extremist or irresponsible.
The political debate is confiscated by this trick of saying that there is a revealed truth and that any other point of view is dangerous.
thought and debate have become suspect, while psychopathy which imposes without debate has become normal.
I also think that the discomfort of young people is closely linked to the despiritualization of society.
When everything is equal, when everything is interchangeable, how can we build lasting bonds, imbued with respect, strong enough for us to disagree without being angry?
The loss of spirituality is an avenue for religious extremism, sectarian excesses, but also for ideological political postures.
Human beings need to believe, we must ensure that they can believe in something that elevates them rather than in something that justifies them no longer thinking and no longer making an effort.