If mental health has officially been a “great national cause” for more than a year, the results appear meager to many stakeholders. The government returns to the subject on Tuesday, June 2, with in particular the promise to immediately direct students in difficulty towards appropriate follow-up.
To detect mental health problems early, each young person who will be “identified” by National Education (school doctors, school nurses, teachers, etc.) will benefit from “skip the line to have an appointment within 24-48 hours” with a “psychologist, psychiatrist or child psychiatrist who can take care of them”, announced Tuesday on franceinfo the Minister of Health Stéphanie Rist.
The region’s health professionals will have to “organize among themselves” so as to “free up slots” for these “emergencies”, continued Stéphanie Rist, ensuring that “when we identify psychiatric disorders earlier, we avoid hospitalizations”. However, the exact functioning of this system remains to be clarified, while school medicine and psychiatry are facing a glaring shortage of personnel.
“There are more and more degraded situations with serious events, but fewer and fewer school doctors,” warned Jocelyne Grousset, co-secretary of the school doctors’ union SNMSU-UNSA Education, warning against the risk of “clogging up” doctors with bad addressing.
The minister also announced on Tuesday that she wanted to put an end to restraint practices in psychiatric establishments by 2030. “We must commit to zero restraint” to guarantee “human dignity” and because restraint can lead to “even stronger” mental disorders, she said.
Through this practice, hospitalized patients are physically restrained. Its abolition would follow a long-standing demand from patient associations and human rights defenders.
Here again, the procedure to follow remains unclear: “we are initiating the work”, explained the Ministry of Health during a briefing to the press, admitting that “this objective will not be achieved tomorrow”. Some doctors express doubts about the realism of this measure, due to lack of broader ambition for an overhaul of French psychiatry.
Lack of resources
Minister Stéphanie Rist spoke before welcoming other government representatives – national education, citizenship, digital technology, etc. – to her ministry in the afternoon to take stock of the great cause launched in 2025 around mental health.
This was decided by the former prime minister, Michel Barnier, during his short-lived stay at Matignon, before being extended for 2026 by the current head of government, Sébastien Lecornu.
Mental health has greatly gained visibility in recent years, particularly in the face of concerns for the mental state of young people in the post-Covid period, and, more broadly, in a context that has long been difficult for psychiatry, hit by a lack of resources and resources.
But, by all accounts, the “great cause” has barely borne fruit, despite the mid-2025 announcement of an interministerial plan. At the end of May, in Le Monde, a group of elected officials – including Michel Barnier himself as well as former health ministers – and caregivers regretted a “lack of visibility on the implementation of concrete actions”.
The current government emphasizes several achievements; the rise of “first aid” in mental health, aiming to give everyone the techniques to respond immediately to a psychological emergency situation, and the continuation of “My Psy Support”, a system which allows certain consultations with the psychologist to be reimbursed.
However, the two subjects are far from unanimous. Many psychologists refuse to join “Mon Soutien Psy”, deeming the reimbursed prices and the number of sessions insufficient, and several specialists have questioned the seriousness of certain first aid training, emphasizing that they were often given by practitioners of pseudo-therapies without a scientific basis.
Thanks to the great cause, “we talk a lot more about mental health and better,” psychiatrist Rachel Bocher, co-signatory of the Le Monde column, told AFP. But “that is not enough: words will not be enough to cure the ills. »
