« The mechanisms of social mimicry work for all of our behaviours, including suicide. It is not a modern phenomenon: Goethe wrote in 1787 the novel that made him famous, The Sufferings of the Young Werther, whose hero commits suicide because the woman he loves married another man. The novel was a huge success and apparently triggered a wave of mimic suicides in Europe at the time. We do not have the figures of the time, but this phenomenon has been studied today and confirmed. When a star commits suicide, it of course influences the frail, suffering from pre-existing psychological difficulties but also the general public, significantly increasing the number of suicidal acts in the following period. »

« Please stay there. We need you down here, need poets who serve no purpose. Need sensitive people in what is sometimes called "a world of brutes". Imagine a world without poets, where there would be only brawlers, winners, bankers. Imagine a world where the only plants left would be thousands of square kilometers of tomatoes growing above ground under plastic sheeting, or plants like that. Well, the poet, it is like the forgotten waste of wasteland where wild herbs and wildflowers grow. We'll meet again in September. Friendly. »

« Depression as disconnection and withdrawal from the world... "When you give up, you don't suffer. When you surrender, even to sadness, you don't suffer anymore," Said Saint-Exupéry. When one is exhausted from living, renunciation could initially, and from the outside, appear as a refuge. But in order not to suffer, we give up living. One resigns ourselves to a life without flavor for not being able to live it without pain. Alas, this does not work, and suffering persists. Of course, as we stop fighting, we feel a relief, at least transient. We give up, we will no longer make efforts, we surrender to the disease. But soon come the ruminations on the theme "I fell very low". Gradually, other sufferings take hold: no more those of failure, of mourning, of loss. But those of self-contemplation in impotence; the breakdown of the social bond, because depression is loneliness or misunderstanding; even the most understanding or informed relatives will always tend to expect more from us, to say, "He (or she) needs to make a little more effort." And then the other risk is that of our slow disconnection from the world. While the sadness and associated moods are initially like a kind of hypersensitivity to the surrounding world, in its dark aspects, depressive illness alters, beyond a certain stage, emotional reactivity. It has long been thought that it increases the ability to feel negative moods and decreases the ability to feel positive moods. In reality, the first proposal is to be corrected, to refine, and probably only concerns the beginner or minor forms of depression. Once depression has become more intense, there is an overall bluntness of the ability to feel all forms of moods, positive or negative. What really makes sense: depression, in its sickly form, is a step back to save yourself and protect yourself from the things of life, which we can no longer cope with. Its only virtue, in the first place, is that it can have an analgesic effect, freeing us from the pain of having to face it. »