“This message is a cry of the heart.” In the absence of solutions at the beginning of June, Lucille Packo decided to write to the deputy for his constituency, at dawn. Several weeks have passed since he managed to obtain his antidepressant treatment, quetiapine and venlafaxin, but essential to stabilize his depression.
Like her, thousands of patients are defenseless in the face of the shortage of psychiatric drugs that last and worsen since the beginning of the year.
“I have been fighting my depression for several years, it is an intense struggle, attracting all the scarce resources that I have left. I often wanted to give myself, but I have kept well. Today I left,” I wrote this woman in her message to the elected official in X, who will only receive an incomplete answer.
“Suicidal impulses that return to the load”
Lucille Packgo has been suffering episodic depression for 15 years. In spring, the young woman who lives between Troyes and Reims still managed to gather her treatment by the pharmacy to the pharmacy. But this month for the first time, it only takes two capsules instead of the three prescribes: it loses a box, “despite the innumerable number of pharmacies.” “Chapter. I give up. The molecule that allowed me to keep my head out of the water is no longer available,” he writes.
“The mood is very low,” he tells BFMTV.com. “I have suicidal impulses that return to the load. I sincerely believe that if I do not receive my treatment next week, I ask for hospitalization.”
Psychiatrists, distressed in front of their patients, work blind and try to find alternatives such as: “We pay attention to the case of a case case,” says psychiatrist Hugo Baup, who “spends a lot of time on the phone to try to find replacement molecules.” We call pharmacists, we call generalists. I find it dramatic. There are people who get up in the morning in the ball in the stomach to find out if they will find their molecules. “
“Create decompensations, depressions, sometimes rehospital, there are people who arrive at the emergency room for that,” continues the psychiatrist of Périgueux (Dordagne), because “when we are in the brutal weaning of certain antidepressants, we can have very important symptoms of fault.
“I had to change my molecule during the night”
This is precisely what Axelle Mondain, deprived of sertraline, has been going through one of the antidepressants exhausted for months. This 32 -year -old woman suffers from severe depression and post -traumatic stress after losing two children at birth in two years.
“My habitual treatment has not been found, I had to change my molecule overnight, without retirement period,” he groans this heavyweight driver who lives in Lecture in the Gers. “Now it should normally be done gradually.”
While he expects his new treatment to take effect, this thirty -year -old mother struggles to keep her head out of the water. “It is very difficult. I see myself immersing myself in very dark periods, especially because we reached a symbolic appointment for me. It really was not the time for the antidepressants to suddenly stop …”
Face forced withdrawal
Elisa, 28, describes this feeling of fault due to unprepared weaning. Achievement of chronic anxiety disorders since 2019, the young woman must also dispense with series in certain days due to scarcity. When you do not take it for a few days, the time to find available actions in pharmacies, has “the impression of having continuous dizziness.”
“It seems that I am going to fall into apples, I have sweats and big concentration problems, as if it becomes ill, but never stopped.”
This Rodez resident (Aveyron), who was about to stop his treatment, explains that a few weeks ago, he regularly pushed the door of all pharmacies in the department in search of his molecule, “but in general when one does not have the stock, the others either have it.” “It was a mental charge more personally for me, and it was something stressful and that created sensations of holes in the body,” he said.
On the side of pharmacists, it is also “a real discomfort” daily. Every morning, the pharmacist Pierre-Olivier Variot, president of the Union of Frame Pharmaceutical Union (OPPO), explains that he, like his colleagues, must make feet and hands to try to find molecules, in suppliers with those who are not accustomed to work.
No improvement in sight
“The worst part is that it is not going well,” he says, “because everyone is currently in the molecules that are not in breakage: and the risk is to impoverish the entire offer.”
The return to normal is not expected to be “for professionals immediately” in the sector. “ANSM (National Medicines Agency) had promised us a return of shares in April, then it was May and there at the end of June we still have nothing, so I don’t know when we can wait,” says the pharmacist, who works in Côte-D’or. The same story on the side of the psychiatrist Hugo Baup: “We are told about an improvement at the end of June, but we do not know so much if we can follow it,” he says.
“I have the impression that there are some pharmacies that begin to receive some actions, but this is not the case in others. At the moment, it is still very unequal.”
In any case, professionals and patients denounce a “dramatic” situation, an additional source of stress “for patients, who can” break live. “Hugo Baup even releases:” We are drunk everywhere with mental health, a great cause of the term of five years, but, frankly, it looks more like a great talk than a great national cause. “
3114: The national suicide prevention number
3114 is the number of contact if you are in mental anguish or if you have suicidal ideas. You can also contact it if one of your loved ones is in this case. It offers to listen with especially trained health professionals, and is available seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
Source: BFM TV
