The Rouvray Hospital Center in the Normandy town of Rouen is among places where psychiatrists are finding themselves on the front line of the pandemic's mental-health fallout. They are fearful that a growing crisis of depression, anxiety and worse may be on the horizon as more livelihoods, futures and hopes are lost to the pandemic.
The ward's chief psychiatrist, Sandrine Elias, gently teases out of the student how the lockdown has left her completely alone, with classes suspended. "Being alone between four walls is terrible," Elias says. "The halting of life like this, it reverberates on people. It is not good." "The first lockdown didn't really have much of an effect on me," he tells Guillin, but the second one "really sank me."