Covid-19: “16–25 year olds are the most psychologically fragile”

What do we cur­rently know about the impact of the Cov­id-19 crisis on the men­tal health of young people?

Bruno Falis­sard. Noth­ing too supris­ing, actu­ally. The data regard­ing the “mor­ale of the French” pro­duced by Santé Pub­lique France come to logic­al con­clu­sions: in Janu­ary 2021, nearly 23% of people suffered from anxi­ety and/or depres­sion, against 13.5% and 10% respect­ively in 2017 ¹.

How­ever, this glob­al obser­va­tion remains rather super­fi­cial, because not every­one has the same reac­tion to the pan­dem­ic. Young people, because less psy­cho­lo­gic­ally “crys­tal­lised” than older people, vary more in terms of men­tal health. For example, they were more dis­traught than aver­age dur­ing the lock­down, but were bet­ter off than oth­ers dur­ing the Sum­mer period.

In the case of chil­dren, it is even harder to pro­duce sci­entif­ic data. First of all, because epi­demi­olo­gic­al stud­ies in psy­chi­atry are almost nev­er done on minors. But also because they tend to exper­i­ence the epi­dem­ic through the eyes of their par­ents. A four-year-old child con­fined with par­ents who were not dis­tressed by the situ­ation could eas­ily not notice any­thing par­tic­u­lar differences.

So, it’s not all doom and gloom?

No. One of the numer­ic­al meas­ures we have is the num­ber of hos­pit­al­isa­tions for sui­cide attempts [all ages included]. We see that between Janu­ary and August 2020, the num­ber of patients was ~8.5% lower than the same peri­od in 2019 ². There is no unequi­voc­al explan­a­tion for this decline, but it is a reoc­cur­ring trend: dur­ing crises or wars, there are few­er sui­cides. We call this an “extern­al organ­iser”: our atten­tion is fixed on this event so much so that we for­get all the oth­er, more per­son­al, reas­ons for our anxi­ety. This is very human, and para­dox­ic­ally, hav­ing a con­crete object to pro­ject your feel­ings on can make you feel bet­ter about them.

For chil­dren, and if their fam­ily envir­on­ment was healthy, the con­fine­ment was some­times even pos­it­ive. I noticed that aut­ist­ic or hyper­act­ive chil­dren in my care were bet­ter dur­ing this peri­od, in par­tic­u­lar because school is a big source of anxi­ety for them. We also noticed that the par­ents spent more time with their chil­dren: doing home­work, play­ing board games, etc.

How­ever, this obser­va­tion is much more nuanced for young adults. We keep repeat­ing that we must act to pro­tect the most vul­ner­able, but we must recog­nise who they are. We don’t yet have any fig­ures on the situ­ation post-Septem­ber 2020, but the clin­ic­al feed­back is clear: the most psy­cho­lo­gic­ally fra­gile are 16 to 25-year-olds.

Stu­dents and young work­ers are con­fron­ted with a sat­ur­ated labour mar­ket, which offers them no prospects.

Why, spe­cific­ally, the 16 to 25-year-olds? 

Because they are the most exposed. Chil­dren con­tin­ue to go to school and receive sup­port from their par­ents. On the con­trary, stu­dents and young work­ers are con­fron­ted with a sat­ur­ated job mar­ket, which offers them no pro­spects, and they are also deprived of the social and sexu­al life that is abso­lutely neces­sary for the con­struc­tion of their iden­tity at their age. And no one says that! The sexu­al­ity of young people is not a neg­li­gible para­met­er, it is a dis­rupt­ive factor, some­times at the ori­gin of eat­ing dis­orders and sui­cide attempts.

The main prob­lem for this age group is the total lack of recog­ni­tion of their sac­ri­fices. The lock­down has been an extremely bru­tal situ­ation psy­cho­lo­gic­ally, and it was inten­ded to pro­tect a very spe­cif­ic seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion: the very old. And no one admit­ted it. No one thanked young people for play­ing along when Cov­id-19 is not even really dan­ger­ous for them. In addi­tion, liv­ing con­di­tions of young adults tend to be far inferi­or than most retired people and the gov­ern­ment has not made any ges­ture, such as addi­tion­al social wel­fare to them.

On the con­trary, they are con­stantly chas­tised in the media. They are reproached for party­ing and tak­ing risks res­ult­ing in a flag­rant double pun­ish­ment. Con­trary to what is often stated, I don’t think that there is a “bash­ing” of the eld­erly: they are pro­tec­ted much more than the young.

Do you fear that this situ­ation will fuel an intergen­er­a­tion­al conflict?

Gen­er­a­tion­al ten­sions are anthro­po­lo­gic­al invari­ants; they will always be there. But the cur­rent situ­ation is par­tic­u­larly harm­ful. In my job as a psy­chi­at­rist, half of my work is to put a name to a prob­lem: by refus­ing to recog­nise the efforts of young people as well as mak­ing them feel guilty, we are feed­ing a resent­ment that is wor­ry­ing. And that comes on top of oth­er issues like glob­al warm­ing, the weight of which is under­es­tim­ated in the minds of young people. A sur­vey by Le Monde ³ revealed that 56% of respond­ents fear a gen­er­a­tion con­flict, and that 81% believe that “young people and stu­dents are the most poorly taken into account in gov­ern­ment decisions”. It might be time to make a ges­ture to thank them. 

Interview by Juliette Parmentier