As summer approaches, they arrive in class wearing flip-flops, he in a multicolored Bermuda shorts, she in a small beach dress. Folded or rolled up, the terry towel spills out of the bags where it has progressively replaced bulky and unnecessary binders. In Nice, university students just need to cross the Promenade des Anglais to relax by the sea. Their heads – should we hope so? – still plunged in seminars, their feet already in the water. There are certainly worse situations. However, appearances can be deceiving: perhaps hell is hidden under the pebbles.
A study conducted over the 2005-2006 academic year in six universities in the Provence-Alpes-Cรดte d’Azur region and recently published by the Bulletin of the Institute of Health Monitoring shows that one in four first-year students suffers from serious psychiatric disorders. Depression and anxiety hit girls (33%) harder than boys (16.3%), a phenomenon often induced by an apparent male resilience rooted in educational constraints and the fears of social perception. For depression, “two-thirds of disorders appear after entering the university.” This correlation raises questions about the unconscious meanings of university prospects as well as the psychological state of the young people entering them: deep uncertainties about their professional orientation made even more precarious by the ignorance of their identity desires, the economic, or even social, urgency to “establish themselves in life” to lighten a parental burden, itself weighed down by a psychological debt towards their parents, a particularly gloomy horizon of an economic and financial crisis whose promises of exit are already jeopardized by the inevitability of loan repayments. Not to mention the feeling of anxiety, this national one, linked to the risks of “social downgrading”, especially for high school graduates and those higher up whose diploma is no longer deemed “relevant for accessing management jobs.” The observation, however reported by Le Monde, of the “discrepancy between this perception and the realities” probably changes nothing.
More than half of the victims of one of these mental pathologies, suffer consequences, “significant on their studies or work,” their “relations with close ones” or their “social relations.” Even more so for the 76% of those affected “jointly” by depression and anxious disorders, a comorbidity much more widespread. 30% of the free time of those over 15 years old, it should be recalled, is dedicated to this “sociability,” this learning and understanding of the other, instead of the parental imago.
If, in the end, barely 30% of them consult mental health professionals, the majority of students from the Azurรฉen region demand – whether the request is verbalized or enacted – support in the form of personalized follow-up of their curriculum: vocational training programs, punctuated by an emancipatory accompaniment of the student – tutored projects and supervised internships at the IUT of Nice, “personalized coaching” over the five years of a Master at the Ipag, to name just these two examples – enjoy resounding success.
It is easy to understand the reasons: in a context marked by a clearly proclaimed reassessment of liberalism by politicians, it becomes more difficult to demand of a student in post-adolescence, to invest themselves as an adult in an undefined reality devoid of landmarks for their future. The one who refuses to grasp the immaterial is not completely insane.
