Like clockwork, the state suddenly remembers that human beings have minds only after blood is pooled on the sidewalk. In the suburbs of Paris, a man allegedly pulls a trigger, lives are extinguished, and the machinery of justice springs into forensic motion. The prosecutors step before the microphones to announce that the suspect has been whisked away for psychiatric observation. Not to heal him. Not to understand the cascading institutional failures that led to a slaughter. No, the state needs to know if his psychiatric health is compatible with an interrogation room. It is the only time the neoliberal state ever finds an open psychiatric bed: when it needs to make sure a body is legally sound enough to be thrown into a cage.
Every single time a headline like this crosses the wire, my stomach turns, because I know what the waiting rooms look like before the police tape goes up. Last autumn, an emergency room nurse at a public hospital just outside Paris described to me the soul-crushing routine of turning away suicidal, terrified young men because there was simply nowhere to put them. She told me about patients strapped to gurneys in drafty hallways for seventy-two hours, treated with chemical restraints instead of human care, while doctors begged administrative overseers for a single inpatient bed that never materialized. Those people do not get emergency psychiatric evaluations from the state. They get a shrug, a prescription for generic tranquilizers, and a bus ticket back to the margins of society.
Let us name the architects of this slow-motion carnage. Emmanuel Macron and his endless conveyor belt of neoliberal technocrats—figures like former prime minister Gabriel Attal and a string of interchangeable health ministers—have waged a relentless war of attrition against public medicine. For years, Macron’s regime has treated French healthcare not as a sacred social contract, but as an unruly ledger that needs to be disciplined by McKinsey consultants and European Union fiscal straitjackets. Over the last two decades, France has systematically shuttered tens of thousands of full-time psychiatric beds. Public mental health dispensaries, once the pride of community-based medicine, have been starved of resources, leaving overworked staff to drown in impossible caseloads.
This is the grim calculus of modern austerity: starve the hospital, gut the social safety net, and then act completely bewildered when catastrophic violence erupts in neglected suburbs. The political class refuses to fund prevention, but their wallets fly wide open for the carceral response. When a working-class community in the banlieues cries out for addiction specialists, youth counselors, and accessible psychiatric clinics, Macron’s government gives them specialized riot police, drones, and heavier batons. The message from the Élysée Palace is unmistakable: your pain is not worth a single euro of public investment until it turns into a crime scene.
What makes this forensic pantomime so grotesque is its absolute cynicism. To call what this suspect is receiving psychiatric observation is a sick joke. It is not care; it is an audit of cognitive competence to grease the wheels of a prosecution. The state acts as a landlord inspecting the structural integrity of a burned-out tenement solely to decide whether it can still evict the tenant. Where were the state-sponsored psychiatrists six months ago? Where was the institutional intervention when warning signs were flashing in red, when family members or neighbors or local clinics were crying out for help into a void of automated phone trees and months-long waiting lists?
The working class always pays the price for this bipartisan elite consensus. It is ordinary people, scraping by in outer-ring suburbs, who have to dodge the bullets when an untreated crisis inevitably detonates. Meanwhile, the politicians who slashed the hospital budgets retreat behind armed security details, shielded from the terrifying social breakdown their own policies created. They will offer their customary thoughts and condolences, promise crackdowns on crime, and ignore the rotting infrastructure of public health they personally engineered.
I am exhausted by a system that treats psychiatric care as an emergency tool of the penal colony rather than an absolute human right. Real public safety does not begin with an interrogation table, and it will never be delivered by a forensic examiner assessing whether a broken mind is legally fit for prison. It begins with fully funded public hospitals, robust neighborhood clinics, and a government that values human dignity over corporate tax cuts. Until the working class wrenches power away from the budget-slashing technocrats who rule us, we will keep burying our neighbors, and the state will keep pretending the only doctor you ever deserve to see is the one working for the prosecutor.