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PARIS - France's "national psychiatrist" has issued an alarming report on the democratic and social health of the nation as it prepares to select a new President next year.
Gerard Mermet, a sociologist who publishes a respected bulletin on the country's state of mind every two years, suggests that France now suffers from a collective form of three mental illnesses: Paranoia, schizophrenia and hypochondria.
In Francoscopie 2007, Mermet says that France is "schizophrenic", because it finds it difficult to "recognise the realities" of the "great changes" happening in the world around it.
France is "paranoid" because it constantly believes itself to be the victim of a "global plot" and to have been betrayed by its own "elites".
Finally, France is a "hypochondriac" because it downplays its achievements and advantages and wilfully exaggerates its economic and social ills.
All in all, Mermet says, the French are individually happy but collectively miserable. No candidate in next year's election will dare to point out this contradiction, he says. They would immediately be accused of being part of an "elite" conspiracy to deny the hardships of the people.
What the country needs is a plain-talking politician, capable of making the French face up to realities, both good and bad.
In the nearly 500-page latest edition of a book which has appeared every two years since 1985, studies of market research, social trends, economic and demographic statistics and opinion polls suggest there is yawning gap - much larger than in other countries - between everyday life in France and the unsuccessful, angry, confused image that France has of itself.
"The French suffer more in their minds, than in their flesh," Mermet says. "By not facing up to realities, we are in danger of turning France's many advantages into handicaps."
Apart from anything else, Mermet feels the French should "get out more". Only one in 10 French people each year travel abroad - much fewer than in other European Union countries.
Ignorance of the rest of the world, he suggests, helps the French to insist, simultaneously, that their social model is excellent and everything is going to the bad.
- INDEPENDENT
