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Virginie, 16, is tall, a blonde, attractive and does well at school. But she no longer cares. "You don't understand. There is nothing wrong with me. I just see things clearly and the world is dark. It is black."
She lives with her parents, both doctors, and a
high-achieving younger brother in Brittany, northwestern France, and has been seriously depressed for nearly three months. Her mother, shocked and scared when she found her daughter's suicidal diary in the spring, sent Virginie to a psychiatrist.
The therapy failed to help and now her friends are as frightened as her mother, watching helplessly as their schoolmate sinks deeper into a profound depression.
"I have no real friends. My parents are disappointed in me. No one likes me," Virginie told me. "People say this is just teenage angst, but it is not. I just see things as they are."
Virginie may think she is alone but she is not. Research to be published later this year will reveal that depression has exploded among French youth with increases of up to a third in the past decade.
The statistics are striking. Three successive studies of around 15,000 children reveal that, among young people aged from 12 to 18, 9 per cent of boys and 22 per cent of girls show signs of depression and anxiety - three times the total in 1993. For the older adolescents the levels are even higher, with an increase to 14 per cent among boys and 35 per cent among girls aged 17 to 18.
A series of recent incidents - one last month involving two Corsican teenage girls who leapt from the windows of different buildings at the same time while encouraging each other on mobile phones - has focused attention on the problem. Few, however, see easy solutions to a phenomenon that has its roots deep in French society.
"We are talking about the values of the country, about our attitude to the state and the individual, about profound elements of our identity," said Francois Dubet, professor of sociology at Bordeaux University. "It will change over time, because there are ideas that are clearly not working any longer."
All experts talk about the complexity of the causes. Dr Florence Tual, of the public health service in the department of Morbihan, a national blackspot for suicide, listed a range of possible factors ranging from the employment market, where qualifications are prized far beyond practical experience or raw potential, to rapid transformation in some parts of France from a rural to an urban and industrialised society. But, said Tual, "there is no single road to depression and suicide; it's a complex combination of factors".
Nor is economic success a guarantee of immunity, as once thought. The children of relatively wealthy professional parents are often more at risk than others. This does not surprise sociologist Dubet. "The middle classes have more to lose. In this country, you keep your social position by getting good diplomas. That guarantees you access to work that is seen as honourable and you are esteemed socially," he said. "The working classes have less to lose in terms of social position, so the pressure is commensurately less. Still, in general, French students are among the most stressed in Europe."
The link between depression and success at school is backed by statistics gathered by Tual in Brittany which show that local increases in anxiety and suicide closely track rising local success in the critical baccalaureat exams and expanding local access to further education.
"In France a great deal depends on getting the right qualifications," said Veronique Pierre-Hublot, a former teacher and publisher of extra-curricular textbooks. "There are very few employers who are prepared to risk hiring someone just on what they have made of themselves. The parents are anxious themselves about their own jobs and transmit that anxiety to their kids."
Stress at school or at home is also increasingly leading to binge-drinking in France - although French adolescents are still far behind their British counterparts in terms of alcohol or narcotics consumption.
Parents are more and more aware of the problem. Christine Collot, 42, from Lamorlaye in the Oise, on the outskirts of Paris, said her daughter in her last year at school was under "hellish pressure".
"It is not the teachers' fault. Like everyone, they have to make their students aware that this is an important year. In fact, my daughter wants to be the best at any price. She wants to succeed too much," she said. "I try and explain that we will not love her less if she doesn't get good results."
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