États d’âme en réanimation COVID-19 : des émotions aux devoirs moraux des acteurs du soin

The Covid-19 pandemic instills emotions that can be understood in the pathological sense of mental disorder and/or in the heuristic sense of a moral dimension. So what about this distinction in critical care and resuscitation services where caregivers are at the forefront of events? What to do with emotions? The objective of this work is to pose a medico-psychological and ethical perspective on these questions, starting from the hypothesis that emotions have a specific use during the pandemic. The first step will be to show that anguish and fear, although different from an epistemological point of view, arise from the same historical place, which is the discourse of the medical world with death. The awareness of the inevitable makes share the same need of the caregiver and the citizen of a psychic economy which will lead to differentiating two possible reactions to emotions: one to face up and one to come to terms with. This psychic interlacing, inherent to the pandemic context, calls for critical care on a moral dimension related to the issue of abandonment of the human person and the poorly understood notion of “mass death”. An answer to this difficulty would be found in the concept of “being-caregiver-close” but its application also supposes an ethical reflection on the outlets and the personal virtues.