Mental health: “Keeping a teenager who is unwell waiting exposes them to very significant risks”

Child psychiatrist Marie Rose Moro is head of the adolescent center at Cochin Hospital (AP-HP) in Paris, which welcomes distressed young people and their families. Amid rising hospitalizations for suicidal thoughts, particularly among adolescent girls, she examines the causes of their deteriorating mental health. She highlights what she calls a "bias" : "The collective tendency not to listen to what young girls have to say."

This is indeed an underlying trend, predating the Covid-19 crisis and not just affecting France. The mental health of young people is deteriorating, in France as in many other European countries, the United States, and Canada. This trend, according to the studies available to us, is strong in France—stronger than in Italy or Spain, countries whose healthcare systems are comparable to ours. Covid-19, like all significant collective events, gives us the impression of a "time zero" ; we have all been affected by the epidemic, and young people have been even more so by the repeated lockdowns. But to think that Covid was the beginning of something is an illusion.

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