Psychiatrist Olivier Guillin, center, talks with Nathan, a 22-year-old student, at the Rouvray psychiatric hospital, in Rouen, western France, Wednesday, Nov. 25, 2020. Lockdowns that France has used to fight the coronavirus have come at considerable cost to mental health. Surveying points to a surge of depression most acute among people without work, in financial hardship and young adults. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

ROUEN, France (AP) — The panicked 22-year-old is led to Consultation Room No. 2, with its easy-mop floor and honeycombed meshing over the window. Behind her, the psychiatric emergency ward’s heavy double doors — openable only with a staff member’s key — thud shut.

With anxious taps of her white sneakers, she confides to an on-duty psychiatrist how the solitude of the coronavirus lockdown and the angst of not finding work in the pandemic-battered job market are contributing to her maelstrom of anxieties. She is unnerved that she is starting to obsess about knives, fearful that her mental health might be collapsing.

“The lockdown — let’s not pretend otherwise — worries me,” the young woman explains through her surgical mask, as the psychiatrist, Irene Facello, listens intently.

“I want to be reassured,” the woman says, “that I’m not going mad.”

Forcing millions of people to once again stay home — cutting them off from families and friends, shuttering businesses they invested in, university classes that fed their minds and nightspots where they socialized — has, for now, begun to turn back the renewed coronavirus surge in France that pushed it in November past the bleak milestone of 52,000 dead.

But the costs to mental health have been considerable. With numbers now falling for French COVID-19 patients in intensive care, psychiatrists are facing a follow-up wave of psychological distress. Health authorities’ surveying points to a surge of depression most acute among people without work, those in financial hardship and young adults.

The Rouvray Hospital Center in the Normandy town of Rouen is among places where psychiatrists are finding themselves on the front line of the pandemic’s mental-health fallout. They are fearful that a growing crisis of depression, anxiety and worse may be on the horizon as more livelihoods, futures and hopes are lost to the pandemic. Associated Press journalists spent 10 hours in the sprawling 535-bed facility, the day after French President Emmanuel Macron laid out a blueprint stretching into mid-January for the gradual lifting of lockdown restrictions.

At the psychiatric emergency unit, as Facello sends the 22-year-old home with a prescription for anti-anxiety drugs and an appointment to see her again in two weeks, the double doors swing open once more.

It is another young woman, aged 25, a linguistics student. She is steered to Consultation Room No. 1, where she sits silently in the gloom as night falls.

On the ward’s whiteboard, which lists patients’ names and details, an abbreviated initial diagnosis handwritten on a slip of paper uses acronyms to spell out how closely she may have brushed with the irreparable. For the past week, it says, she’d suffered “IDS” — suicidal ideas — and imagined “IMV,” or voluntarily ingesting medicines.

The ward’s chief psychiatrist, Sandrine Elias, gently teases out of the student how the lockdown has left her completely alone, with classes suspended.

It isn’t the sole cause of her malaise. Elias learns that the young woman had a difficult adolescence, with suicide attempts. Isolation during the epidemic has only amplified the student’s distress. In a quiet voice, she tells Elias that it “confronts us with ourselves.”

“I’m a stay-at-home type of person, but this absolute constraint is a real weight,” she says.