It is a sector which has difficulty adapting to containment against the coronavirus. The follow-up of patients in psychiatry is severely tested with travel restrictions: treatments are disrupted, as are the possibilities of support for these patients. For the 420,000 people hospitalized and the 2 million followed on an outpatient basis, this situation risks increasing their disorders.
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"It is extremely hard for them"
"Right now we are doing Covidian anti-psychiatry. We have stopped everything that makes up psychic care." coward passably pissed off Mathieu Bellahsen at the microphone of Europe 1. This psychiatrist has been witness since the beginning of the confinement of a commotion which rises in his unit of Asnières-sur-Seine, in Hauts-de-Seine. "All our tools for treating the atmosphere, taking the time with a patient, sitting with him, making a game ... all that has disappeared," he says. "We put on smocks, masks, it creates a distance and it is extremely hard for them. We lock them up more and more, introverts or phobics are more and more."
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In an attempt to calm the spirits, for lack of being able to leave, patients are now allowed to smoke in their room. However, this is a completely different challenge for patients being followed from home. Consultations are now carried out by telephone, which is far from being without consequence. "Usually, we see an expression of the face, an attitude, the body that deploys or shrinks, but there nothing," explains for his part Doctor Delphine Glachant, psychiatrist in a Val-de-Marne establishment. "I may not have to start from scratch, I hope, but far back."
The risk of being destitute with a person who suffers from disorders
Being completely alone and helpless with a person suffering from disorders, Audrey knows the difficulties. With confinement, this mother of a 27-year-old schizophrenic man was cut off from medical help for long days. "He is someone extremely anxious and there, not being able to go out or run as he wanted, to have papers on him ... these are full of new elements which disturbed him", testifies she at the microphone of Europe 1. A state which manifested itself "by an aggressiveness and a need to consume alcohol".
Distraught, she decides to lock her son in his room, while he was living there as a recluse. A situation he found it difficult to bear: "He became suicidal, and I had to hospitalize him."
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To avoid other situations like Audrey's, a platform has since been set up, "Psy Île-de-France", which can be reached at 01.48.00.48.00 free of charge every day between 1 p.m. and 21 hours. An initiative welcomed by the latter, who "felt very alone last week".