The Ile-de-France Regional Health Agency has urgently suspended the activity of four services of the public child-psychiatric hospital Fondation Vallée in Val-de-Marne for its practices of confining children, it announced Thursday in a press release.
"This decision follows several consistent reports of non-compliant practices involving the confinement of minor patients, and is based on the inspection carried out last November," the ARS said in a statement.
The services suspended, starting from the evening of February 27, are the four services providing full hospitalization, which currently have "fewer than twenty patients".
The ARS indicated that day hospital and outpatient services "are not affected by this decision and continue to admit patients."
"The findings leading to this decision (...) describe a use of isolation and restraint, and lengths of hospitalization unjustified in view of the patients' state of health, their needs and the current professional consensus," said the ARS.
Following the announcement by the ARS, the CGT Health union of Val-de-Marne declared itself "very concerned about this abrupt decision to eliminate a significant part of the child and adolescent psychiatric care services in the department and the region."
"Hospital staff formally deny the accusations of bad practices," David François, departmental secretary of the CGT Health union, told AFP.
Furthermore, for the time being, the children present in the suspended units are "without an alternative solution," he added.
The ARS, for its part, stated that these alternative solutions "will be effective at the end of the school holidays" – a period during which children traditionally return to their families.
The Vallée Foundation is among the largest child psychiatric facilities in the Ile-de-France region.
Formerly a leading institution in child psychiatry, its reputation has gradually faded, against a backdrop of conflict between proponents of psychoanalysis, historically very present in French psychiatry as well as at the Vallée Foundation, and supporters of so-called behavioral and developmental techniques, based on more standardized processes.
The suspended services are the "Bourneville" unit for adolescents aged 12 to 17, "Dolto" for 4-12 year olds, "Winnicott" (6-12 year olds), and the Adolescent Treatment and Evaluation Assessment Unit (UETA), the latter being "without de facto activity as it is undergoing conversion".
Françoise Dolto and Donald Winnicott were both pediatricians and psychoanalysts, and Désiré Magloire Bourneville was a late 19th-century alienist who sought to develop care for children.
Last week, the French National Authority for Health (HAS) clearly stated that the psychoanalytic approach was "not recommended" in the treatment of autism, as it has "only an insufficient level of evidence".
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