at 15, she recounts her battle with anxiety attacks since the Covid-19 pandemic

This article is part of our “Les focuses de franceinfo” operation, which highlights key topics that are little covered in the presidential campaign: the cost of housing, the public hospital crisis, the taboo of mental health and the carbon footprint of transport.

“I hear buzzing, I don’t see as usual, I have ants in my hands…” Sitting on her bed in the middle of March, 15-year-old Justine* modestly describes the “trouble” who have been attacking him since the end of the first confinement due to the Covid-19 epidemic. “It’s like I’m coming out of my body. I feel like I’m alone in the world, that the others are robots and that I’m in a simulation, as if it weren’t real”she adds, her eyes lowered to her hands which she fiddles with nervously.

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In the spring of 2021, a psychologist put words to the feeling of anxiety that sometimes grips Justine: the depersonalization-derealization syndrome. This mental disorder can occur in the event of intense stress. For the teenager, it was the return to social life at the end of the first confinement, experienced as a constraint, which triggered the first crises.

Covid-19 has affected the mental health of a large part of the population, including the youngest, like Justine. After two years of pandemic, Public Health France still alerted at the beginning of March on “high levels” trips to the emergency room “for suicidal gestures, thoughts and mood disorders” among 15-17 year olds. From mild anxiety to attempted suicide, attacks on mental health have taken multiple forms in the youngest, as in adults, not always requiring psychiatric follow-up or drug treatment. But for them, more than for their elders, they may remain more difficult to assume.

In March 2020, before the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, Justine was 13 and in fifth grade. She lives with her mother in a rural town, about thirty kilometers from Toulouse (Haute-Garonne). A fan of Korean K-pop group BTS, manga and anime, she has yet to color the brown locks blue that frame her diaphanous face. She reads a lot, learns Japanese on her own, already responds to her mother with the repartee proper to her age and can boast of good school results. If she made friends with a few fourth graders, more “mature”she does not feel “at [s]has room for school”. The schoolgirl thinks she is perceived by her classmates as “the weird girl, goth”. In a few weeks, she must fly to Japan. She hadn’t really heard of the Covid-19 when the order to confine fell in mid-March.

Justine is sad to see her trip fall through, but she experiences the forced isolation like a “good news”. She spends her days working, watching movies and playing video games. Above all, she is delighted to no longer see anyone, she who confesses to having always had a “social battery” which discharges quickly. Little by little, the young girl locks herself in the safe cocoon of her room, until she finds it difficult to get out.

When the confinement is lifted, the interactions exhaust Justine more. As the back-to-school season approaches, she once again experiences “at least once a week” of “crises of derealization” whom she had briefly known, as a young child, after a traumatic blood test. When she is “tired”, “stressed”in the presence of “too many people” as in class, or when confronted with “a situation which [la] outrun”anxiety seizes her to the point that she has the impression of leaving her body and the real world for several minutes.

Dreading these crises, the teenager refuses more and more often to go to class, to see her friends. She gradually stops volleyball, which she had just started. A difficult situation to grasp for her mother, an energetic young quadra, engaged in the movement of “yellow vests” and marches for the climate, who sees her cut off from the world and fears her “deschooling”. To encourage her to go out, she moved with her in the city center, in a small house close to the cinema and the media library.

“I felt like I was doing violence to her, forcing her to see people. And I was like, ‘How far is this going to go?'”

Justine’s mother

at franceinfo

In April 2021, Justine was finally convinced by her mother, a social worker, to consult a psychologist. A relief for the latter, even if financing the cost of the fortnightly sessions with her salary of 1,300 euros net is a challenge. Thanks to therapy, but also to the advice of her grandmother, who experienced the same anxieties, Justine manages over the months to identify the situations triggering her “trouble”and learns to let them pass without adding to his panic.

Over time, the frequency and duration of her seizures reduced and Justine returned to her teenage life. On weekends, she sees her friends again, near the town hall. Sometimes they get on a bus to “go shopping” in Toulouse and get lost on the way back. Of her anxieties, Justine told them few things: only a “virtual friend”met on Instagram, is aware of his past difficulties.

If the young girl is better and is now eager to reschedule her trip to Japan, she continues her therapy and knows that she is not out of the woods. “Everything can start again with a trigger other than the Covid.” Since March 14, returning to college without wearing a mask has been stressing her a lot. “Seeing people breathing the same air disgusts me, makes me not want to breatheloose she, a little embarrassed. With the Covid, I realized that there were lots of germs around me. I would hate to hold someone’s hand for example.”

“I think I’m going to keep the mask on, it was easier to be locked in when I was wearing it. It was like a security.”

After high school, Justine wants to leave her small town, where “there is not much to do”. If she does not yet know where she wants to study, she already dreams of joining the scientific police or becoming a psychiatrist. “It’s so interesting what’s on people’s minds. The best thing is when you get results and help others get better.” A way, for her too, to permanently put dark thoughts at a distance?

*Name has been changed.

This article is closed to comments due to the sensitivity of the subject raised with a minor witness.