ROUEN – The panicked 22-year-old is led to Consultation Room No. 2, with its easy-mop floor and honeycombed meshing over the window.
Behind her, the psychiatric emergency ward's heavy double doors — openable only with a staff member's key — thud shut.With anxious taps of her white sneakers, she confides to an on-duty psychiatrist how the solitude of the coronavirus lockdown and the angst of not finding work in the pandemic-battered job market are contributing to her maelstrom of anxieties.
She is unnerved that she is starting to obsess about knives, fearful that her mental health might be collapsing.“The lockdown — let's not pretend otherwise — worries me," the young woman explains through her surgical mask, as the psychiatrist, Irene.