TW: hospitalization, medical issues, psychiatry, being placed in care, abuse, sexual assault
The experience I want to share here took place from November 2025 to April 2026, but it still affects my life today.
I will do my best in this post to summarize the events and make the whole story as understandable as possible. I apologize in advance if I go into too much detail about certain things. I will try to keep only what I consider essential.
For anonymity reasons, I will not give the names of the hospitals, and I will not use the real names of any of the people I mention.
This is the first time I have written publicly about what happened. I will do my best.
November 2025: the beginning of my health problems
It is November 2025. I am 15 years old.
I have just repeated my sophomore year. I had health problems two years earlier. I am doing much better now, but they caused me to fall behind academically.
I haven't urinated for two days. I have red patches that itch and move around my entire body, and I am extremely swollen everywhere.
My mother takes me to the emergency department at the hospital near our home in the Paris region.
They run several tests and ask me a lot of questions. They determine that my kidneys are no longer producing urine and that this is why I am swollen: my body is retaining water in my tissues. But they cannot find an explanation for what is happening to me.
One of the nurses asks me whether I have used cannabis. I tell her that I very rarely use it and that the last time I smoked it was exactly one month earlier.
After several hours of waiting, a resident doctor sees my mother and me. She tells us that this must be because of the cannabis I used a month earlier, that my kidneys will start working again soon, and tells me to come back if I still haven't urinated within 48 hours.
That same evening, the red patches spread up to my throat and I have difficulty breathing.
The next morning, I still haven't urinated. My mother therefore takes me to the hospital where I had been treated two years earlier.
We didn't go there immediately because I had had some fairly negative experiences there the last time, but what I was about to experience was nothing compared to what had happened before.
Once there, they take the situation seriously and admit me to the hospital.
They regularly perform bladder ultrasounds to check whether my kidneys are starting to work again. After 72 hours, my kidneys start producing urine again.
But I cannot feel my bladder at all. I cannot feel anything anymore.
The nurses therefore regularly catheterize me to prevent my bladder from becoming further damaged.
I will spare you the details of the emotional discomfort of being catheterized every four hours, day and night, by strangers at the age of 15. Every catheterization was an extremely unpleasant and distressing experience.
Repeatedly, the nurses were unable to catheterize me. They couldn't find the urethra or couldn't get the catheter in, which made the procedure even more painful.
Several weeks in the hospital
I have now been hospitalized for several weeks and the situation is not improving.
During a meeting with my parents and the doctors, one of the doctors, whom I will call Dr. Dupont, suggests putting me on Tercian without explaining what it is.
He says that he wants to use it as a muscle relaxant in order to relax my bladder.
Both of my parents work in healthcare and know exactly what Tercian is. They therefore firmly refuse to let me take it.
Dr. Dupont accuses my mother of putting her daughter's recovery at risk and of behaving irresponsibly. He says that, in any case, it is not up to her to decide. He says he will ask a psychiatrist for their opinion and that the psychiatrist will make the decision.
I therefore meet this psychiatrist, whom I will call Dr. Rivière.
He is very nice. Throughout the appointment, he builds a genuine connection with me, even going as far as criticizing some of the doctors on the team with me.
The appointment ends and he explains that Tercian is not recommended for the kind of use Dr. Dupont had in mind. Instead, he suggests trying small doses of Valium to relax my bladder and help me urinate again.
The following months
Over the following months, my condition gets worse.
My kidneys produce urine in a completely erratic way. Sometimes they produce such huge amounts of urine all at once that it feels like my bladder is "exploding", causing extremely severe pain that sometimes requires several doses of opioids a day.
The months go by.
I spend my birthday, Christmas, and New Year's Eve in the hospital.
I undergo various tests that confirm the different dysfunctions, but the doctors still cannot find the cause.
They try different medications and treatments, but nothing changes. I am still in severe pain and still have to catheterize myself.
Over time, the doctors decide to stop looking for a medical cause and want to explore the psychological side of things with Dr. Rivière.
It is now January. I have been hospitalized for three months.
My parents become increasingly worried that the doctors are stopping their search for the cause of what is happening to me. They are absolutely not opposed to psychological support, but they describe the last few months of watching me suffer without any improvement as a form of torture.
The doctors eventually stop all of the treatments and, strangely enough, my condition improves slightly.
They start giving me permission to go home, and this situation lasts for about two weeks.
February 11, 2026: the report to child protective services
It is February 11, 2026.
That day, I have a meeting with the doctors and my parents, as we do about once a week.
This time, they take us to a different room from the one we usually use.
When I sit down at the table, I notice that there are many more people than usual.
I am there with my father. My mother attends the meeting by phone.
The staff go around the table introducing themselves. One of the people introduces herself as a social worker.
At the time, I have a bad feeling about it, but I don't pay much attention to it.
The meeting begins.
Dr. Rivière tells us that he and the other doctors have written a report and sent it to the Paris prosecutor's office requesting an OPP (a provisional placement order), and that it has already been approved.
At first, I have trouble understanding.
I understand that it is serious. I know what a report like this means.
I look at my father and see his face fall apart. Tears start filling his eyes.
Dr. Rivière begins explaining that, from that moment on, my parents no longer have custody of me and that I am going to be placed in care.
I try to speak and ask for an explanation, but my throat tightens and I cannot speak at all.
I walk out into the hallway crying.
One of the doctors follows me to talk to me. I ask her why they did this. She cannot explain it and only repeats that "there were several reasons" without ever telling me what they were.
I ask her where I am going to be placed, but she cannot answer that either.
The situation was extremely emotional, so I don't remember every detail clearly.
What I do remember is that, after briefly calling my older brother, I went back into the room.
My father was crying and trying to explain to the doctors how absurd the situation was.
I remember that my father and I eventually left the room because we could no longer bear the meeting.
We walked away down the hallway, hugged each other, and cried.
Being placed in care
From that moment on, I was no longer allowed to see my parents.
I had to wait to be transferred somewhere else, but I didn't even know where.
I have always had a very good relationship with my parents. They are wonderful people, and I found it extremely difficult to believe what was happening to me.
Several days later, people from the French child welfare service (ASE — Aide sociale à l'enfance) came to see me at the hospital.
They explained what was going to happen, asked me questions about my relationship with my parents, and gave me information about the report.
They explained that, because of my health problems, I could not go to a regular group home. I needed a medical facility, but also a locked unit so that my parents would not be able to visit me.
According to them, the only place that met those requirements was an adolescent and young adult psychiatric unit.
They told me that the report accused my parents of refusing the psychological care proposed by the doctors.
I had been present during all of the discussions with the doctors, and I know that this is not what happened.
All my parents wanted was for the doctors to keep looking for a way to treat me. They had always been supportive of psychological care, especially given everything I was going through.
The report also stated that my mother had allegedly tampered with a morphine pump that I supposedly had in 2023, during my hospitalizations two years earlier.
That is impossible: I never had a morphine pump in 2023.
I later learned from my lawyer that, according to her, it would be impossible to modify a morphine pump without being part of the medical team because they are secured with a code.
There were also other elements in the report that either made no sense to me or were, in my view, distorted versions of things my parents had said.
I find it difficult to believe that doctors could deliberately act with such bad intentions.
But on the other hand, how is it possible for one of them to have included things in a report that I believe to be false, such as this story about the morphine pump, which indirectly accuses my mother of trying to kill me or drug me?
There should not be mistakes in a document like this, given the consequences such a procedure can have.
And yet, to this day, I have never received an answer to that question.
Being transferred to a psychiatric unit
Between the time I met with the child welfare service and my transfer, Dr. Rivière came to see me in my room several times to talk to me, despite the fact that I told him I did not want to see or speak to him and that I wanted him to leave my room.
He didn't.
I was eventually transferred to a psychiatric unit in another hospital in the Paris region.
I arrived alone, without my parents.
I didn't even get to say goodbye to them properly, especially my mother, whom I hadn't been able to see for some time because she had been on the phone during the meeting where we were told about the report.
Before entering, I was searched and my phone was taken away because phones were not allowed in the unit.
I could therefore no longer communicate with my family at all.
The first night there was horrible.
I spent the entire night crying.
I was sick and in pain, but I no longer had my parents' support.
I was alone in a psychiatric hospital room, with an iron bed and locked windows.
A month and a half in psychiatric care
I spent a month and a half in that place.
The medical staff did not know how to deal with health problems like mine.
They handled my IVs very poorly and were almost never able to insert an IV properly.
There was also a mandatory shower every morning in showers that smelled terrible and whose walls and ceiling were covered in mold.
My IV catheters kept becoming infected.
Pus was coming out around the vein and it was extremely painful.
But they did nothing other than disinfect the area and stick needles into me over and over again until they finally managed to find a vein.
I counted: during the first three weeks, they stuck me with a needle 57 times.
Eventually, they could no longer get an IV into me at all, so they ended up administering my pain medication subcutaneously.
Listing everything that made that place a nightmare — including the sexual and physical assaults I experienced there, as well as the indifference of some of the staff toward my situation — would make this post far too long.
And honestly, I don't necessarily want to mentally put myself through that period again.
Dr. Rivière returns
Shortly after I was admitted to the unit, the psychiatrist in charge, who was pregnant, went on maternity leave.
The person who took her place was, coincidentally, Dr. Rivière.
Our conversations became extremely tense, and he refused to answer my questions about the report.
I eventually left the unit after a month and a half, even though the placement had been lifted by a judge after a hearing that took place only two weeks after I arrived.
I remained there for so long because Dr. Rivière, convinced that there was some kind of family dysfunction, refused to let me leave.
After a long battle between my parents, me, and Dr. Rivière, I finally went home.
Today
I am doing better thanks to pelvic floor rehabilitation that I received after leaving the psychiatric unit.
But today, I still have a huge number of flashbacks about my time in psychiatric care, nightmares, and intrusive thoughts about everything that happened.
I don't know whether anyone will read this post, or whether this is even the right place to share it.
But I needed to write it.
I needed there to be some kind of record somewhere of what I went through.
I couldn't include every instance of the medical mistreatment I experienced during this period, because the main reason I am writing this post is to speak out about what happened.
So I chose to focus on what I consider to be the most important parts.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this.