“From one day to the next, I was no longer able to read or hold a conversation with my children”

2024-04-04 03:00:26
CLAIRE LE MOING

Every Monday in Talence, on the outskirts of Bordeaux, around ten women discreetly pass through the gate of the Maison des Burnettes, surrounded by a wall of greenery. The former house of a wine estate was the refuge of the city’s inhabitants during the Second World War. The residence now welcomes women of all ages, working in different professions, mostly single mothers, and victims of professional burnout syndrome.

The welcome by the members of L’Burn takes place around a coffee, in the lounges “decorated by an old burnette [une femme qui a adhéré à l’association après un burn-out] having made a retraining in interior architecture”, indicates Anne-Sophie Vives, director of the association, which is celebrating its 5th anniversary and receiving ever more numerous requests for membership.

The former assistant notary, who herself experienced a “severe burnout”with loss of immediate memory, describes her choice to help other women: “I hid it from those around me for a long time. I was able to rebuild myself by talking with other women about my difficulty reconciling my work, my role as a mother and that of a woman. » Before specifying his approach: “Today we are twice as concerned, because of intra-family and professional inequalities, the mental load and the difficulty in reconciling private and professional life. It is a multifactorial exhaustion, which requires specific support. »

“Medical wandering”

The association’s attendance figures confirm the latest conclusions from Public Health France. Indeed, according to the epidemiological bulletin of March 5, psychological suffering linked to work was twice as high in 2019 as in 2007 and, over this entire period, this suffering was twice as high among women, notably with more anxiety and depressive disorders.

Thanks to public funds and several sponsorships, ten employees and around thirty active volunteers from the association came to the aid of more than 600 women in Gironde and elsewhere in France (thanks to videoconferencing) in 2023. Discussion groups, legal permanence or even professional remobilization workshops… the system was designed with specialists in the sector (doctors, lawyers), while being based on “peer-aid”, mutual aid between people who have suffered from the same somatic illness or psychic.

“There are few structures that allow women to get help. They sometimes arrive at us after a medical wandering, because they have not found a psychiatrist. General practitioners even send their patients to us,” notes Anne-Sophie Vives. For all this singularity, the association was a finalist in 2023 for the prize from the La France s’engage foundation, chaired by François Hollande. The former head of state, who visited the House of Burnettes in February, welcomed their “expert work” on this “mental suffering, which is not simply depression and which should be recognized as an occupational illness”.

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