Marion Robin is a psychiatrist who has worked in the Department of Adolescent Psychology of the Montsouris Mutualist Institute. She is currently at the Boulevard Jourdan psychiatric centre, where she treats depressive and suicidal teenagers.
Parents, educators, and sometimes also care-givers, feel at a loss when it comes to finding appropriate responses for dealing with troubled teenagers. The prevalent feeling of powerlessness has multiple causes, but the attacks of 2015 served as a wake-up call, reminding us that violent death can suddenly intrude into our daily lives.
How can you be a bulwark against teenage anxiety when even you have trouble resisting your own fears and when you yourself feel powerless to change what is wrong with the society in which we live? How can we treat those teens whose troubles reflect our own fears and the conflicting values within our society?
While dealing with the issue of depressive teenagers, the author explores our relationship to fear, and, more generally, the paralysis that results from facing death through the media on a daily basis. Could citizen actions create new ways of bonding as a possible avenue for helping teens and adults to act and to heal?