Philippe Jeammet is a psywchiatrist and psychoanalyst. For 20 years he has directed the department of psychiatry for adolescents and young adults at the Institute Montsouris in Paris. He is author of the highly acclaimed Pour nos ados, soyons adultes ["For the Sake of our Adolescents, Let's be Adults"] which has sold 25,000 copies.
Based upon numerous clinical case studies, this book is the personal account of one of the greatest specialists in adolescence who has followed, sometimes for as long as 50 years, the treatment of young psychiatric patients.
Drawing upon this incomparable clinical experience, Philippe Jeammet shows how is it possible to nuture to good health patients seized by a destructive madness, destroying first themselves then moving on to others. The advances achieved in psychiatry, as in neurobiology, today allow us to offer new treatments and to approach psychiatric illness differently.
For Philippe Jeammet, mental disturbances are linked to an emotional overload which the patient seeks in vain to control — something that also happens to supposedly sane people. But if we don't choose our own emotions, and if they impose themselves upon us, we are nonetheless capable of choosing what we do with them. Again it is necessary for us to know that it is possible that the path that leads to destructiveness can be reversed, allowing us to rediscover the will to live.
Freedom is relative, certainly, but that is what makes all the difference.