"How is it that in the starry night, she sees nothing but infinite black?" asks illustrator Mathieu Persan in a powerful graphic novel, "The Passage", a story of his 15-year-old daughter's deep depression and a tribute to the many children in France who "are not doing well".
On the cover, two small silhouettes walk under a starry sky, towards a distant point of light.
Published on March 11 by Hachette, it is a story without pathos, where the voice of a teenager answers that of her father, a graphic novel with clean black and white illustrations, full of fantasy and humor, despite its serious subject.
He depicts the "passage" of adolescence, a time "complicated for everyone, undoubtedly much more so today", but also that of "a 47-year-old who feels himself falling behind in the face of a world that is changing very quickly," Mathieu Persan told AFP.
"It is also the ordeal that we both go through, to rediscover that life is worth living," continues this father with youthful features, a recognized press illustrator, "very unorthodox" because he "does everything with a computer mouse."
"I wish someone had told me things were going to get rough," says the narrator. Because one evening, the police call: they have to come home immediately. Frantic with worry, he and his wife run, hand in hand, towards an "unknown abyss": their eldest daughter has tried to take her own life.
A distress that had been hidden until now. "How is it that in the starry night, she sees nothing but infinite blackness?", the author wonders.
In the novel, the teenager recounts the "foggy and cold" days that follow one another in an absurd world, the feeling of harboring a parasite that devours desires, energy, the will to live... the good student feels "out of a mold in which she was squeezed too hard."
"They don't know how to get me back together," she says, lucidly. During the months of his daughter's hospitalization, now 18 years old, Mathieu Persan remembers having with her "long, very calm discussions, the kind you never think you'll have with your child, about the meaning of life, very raw things."
"She told me about depression, an illness that makes you live in an absolutely atrocious state of torpor." "She expressed something very powerful that needed to be conveyed," continues the illustrator, who threw himself wholeheartedly, eight hours a day, into this novel composed in one summer.
– “ParcoursPsy” –
"Because depression is not a weakness of the soul, yet we still hear: 'Go do some sport!', 'Get up, let's watch this movie'... many friends have said to me: 'But why don't you go on vacation?'" he said.
Faced with what he calls "ParcoursPsy," Mathieu Persan denounces a veritable "social selection," a kind of university admissions platform for healthcare where families are confronted with a scarcity of overcrowded facilities, the high cost of non-reimbursed psychologist consultations, and a sometimes dehumanizing level of care. "How do people with limited means manage, in areas with a shortage of medical professionals?"
On April 4th, he will participate in the "Run for Lorène" charity race organized in Nantes by the Effervescence Jeunes association. Created by the parents of a 15-year-old girl, stabbed by a student from her high school suffering from mental health issues in Nantes in April 2025, it funds projects in support of young people's mental health.
Mathieu Persan wants to pay tribute to "all those children who are not well and whose voices are not heard today." In 2024, hospitalizations of adolescent girls for suicide attempts or self-harm increased "massively" according to public statistics (Drees): +221 for those aged 10 to 14, +141 for those aged 15 to 19, figures which no longer arouse any concern, he laments.
"The principal of her high school told us, and it's quite terrifying: 'Don't worry, we're used to it, we have two or three per class.'" "Our daughter dropped out of school in December: we were never contacted to find out what was happening with her; we just received a report card with no grades."
The royalties from "Passage" are donated to associations working for the mental health of young people.
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