It was while working on her series around psychiatry (broadcast in 2021 on France Culture) that documentary filmmaker Johanna Bedeau felt the need to go further. And, in this case, to probe the state of those she calls, with great delicacy, “our children”. By giving them a voice, truly and at length. By questioning the place we give them and leave them, the way we treat them – parents, institutions and professionals.
It is with their cry of alarm that the series begins. Indeed, whether in Paris, Mâcon or Rennes, all the psychiatrists interviewed here say that, if the health crisis linked to Covid-19 has caused unease among young people to explode, the wave of psychological and psychiatric problems which persists over time cannot alone explain the ills of this youth: anorexia, bulimia, OCD, autism, dyslexia, severe depression. Covid-19, but also climate change, war in Ukraine and other dark news, to which is added the anxiety of parents facing a tomorrow that will not necessarily be better. And, faced with this, everyone also says: a saturated healthcare system, insufficient care, even, some point out, unworthy of a country like France.
Make a diagnosis
Their names are Aiyvi, Mélossa, Cléo, Gaspard, Acku, Liv and Agnian, and, in episode 2, at the sensitive microphone of Johanna Bedeau, everyone tells their story. When and how it started. Why, sometimes, they did not dare to talk about it – afraid of disturbing or not being heard. What the medications or treatment helped. Listening to them, what is striking is both their extreme lucidity and the awareness they have of the need for things to be said and for a diagnosis to be made. Putting words into words is relieving. Soothes. Even if, as this young girl will say, “we don’t care enough about how young people are doing.”
Especially since, and this is the subject of the following episode, each year in France there are around thirty suicides among children under 13 – an underestimated figure according to the National Institute of Health and medical research. Suicidal thoughts, violent behavior towards oneself or others, withdrawal… The episode is trying, such is the uneasiness of these children, “our children”.
The last episode questions unhappiness at school, a source of anxiety that we would like to soothe even though adults, often despite themselves, feed it. A place of teaching, the school seems to have become a place of evaluation. However, for Professor David Cohen, psychiatrist at Pitié-Salpêtrière, in Paris, “children are happier and more efficient when they are positively motivated, and that is something that we have difficulty introducing into our lives. system “. Beyond that, finally, there is a growing concern about their uncertain future in a world that is itself suffering.
Let’s admit that it was out of breath – even out of tears – that we finished listening to this series whose production, signed by Marie-Laure Ciboulet, is particularly airy and luminous. Let us therefore hope that it will be widely heard, here and in high places.