When Morgane takes the train, her anxiety never completely disappears. Often, the young woman inspects the carpet of the seats, thinks before putting her bag on the ground, jumps at the slightest sensation of sting or itch. The last time this student traveled at night in a bunk, she couldn’t sleep a wink. “I was really not well, I kept thinking about bed bugs,” she confides, annoyed. For the past two years, these small insects that swarm in large cities and infiltrate residents’ bedding, furniture or clothing have become her number one source of stress. After visiting a friend whose apartment was infested by these thumbtacks, this Ile-de-France woman can no longer get her mind off the fact that she too could be hit. “For a period of time, that certainty really took over a lot of my life.”
Several days after this visit, Morgane was thus certain of having brought these animals back to her Bordeaux apartment, and to her parents’ in Val-d’Oise. “I started processing everything, I didn’t sleep in my room for three months. I was putting my things in the freezer, I had bought a steamer to clean all my bedding,” she explains, without ever having seen the slightest insect in his apartment. “With hindsight, I don’t think there ever was one,” says the student, who has nevertheless invested hundreds of euros in various products to spray around the house. At the time, these beasts obsessed him. To the point of spending entire nights researching bedbugs and ways to eradicate them. “I couldn’t sleep anymore… Once, I went to bed at 4 a.m. I was so anxious. I even turned on the light in the middle of the night to inspect my sheets,” she recalls.
Over time, his phobia subsided slightly. But Morgane admits that certain reflexes will never leave her. When she travels, she always inspects hotel mattresses, and second-hand bedding is now excluded. So than an Ipsos study for the Badbugs.fr site published in February 2021 indicates that 7% of French people have been infested by bedbugs over the past five years, the exacerbated fears linked to these pests are far from being anecdotal. “I have dozens of patients each year who develop chronic stress vis-à-vis these insects. Sometimes we are on the verge of post-traumatic stress”, analyzes Dr. Pascal Delaunay, entomologist and parasitologist at the University Hospital of Nice.
Hypervigilance
A pharmacist-biologist by training, the man has been working on the subject of bed bugs since the beginning of the 2000s, and can only see the psychological consequences of the resurgence of these parasites in France. “I have more and more patients who have been infested and cannot get over it. They are in a permanent strategy of struggle and survival, in a kind of hypervigilance”. Because even after the last bugs have been exterminated, the memory of their presence can cause real discomfort in patients. “The bedbug goes into your home, which is the symbol of your safety, and into your bed, the symbol of your intimacy. And that can unscrew everyone’s brain”, explains the doctor. “Particularly if it bounces off an event from your past that, consciously or not, has already shattered your sense of security or intimacy.”
While bed bugs are still largely linked, in the collective imagination, to issues of cleanliness and housing hygiene, Dr. Delaunay indicates that some victims also fight against strong feelings of shame and guilt. “I have patients who judge themselves, believing that they should have paid more attention to their household, avoided buying such and such an object… The victim then becomes guilty, which can lead to processes of extreme anger or total breakdown”. Spokesperson for the “anti-bed bug” collective in Marseille, Katya Yakoubi agrees: years after the infection, she still sees the psychological damage in some of her members. “I have people who become compulsive, even obsessive. They sleep on a desk placed in the middle of the kitchen, undress in front of the front door, put petroleum jelly on the legs of their mattresses to prevent them from climb…”, she quotes.
Six years after her apartment in the Paris region was infested with bed bugs and despite moving to the Ardèche, Manon* is thus one of those French people “in a state of constant vigilance” in the face of these pests. The mother of the family does not hesitate to pass all the furniture bought second-hand to the Kärcher, she cleans and inspects her suitcases, her clothes or even her books on each trip outside the home. While the young woman enjoyed flea markets, she stopped antiquing for three years, and even kept trash bags filled with clothes from the “bedbug era” in the bottom of her closets. “They have never been unpacked. It remains in the mind for a very long time… Like a kind of trauma of having lived at home with an unwanted occupant”.
Scams “over 6000 euros”
According a recent Inserm studythis “horror” described by Manon would have even generated more than 72,000 consultations with a general practitioner in metropolitan France between April 2019 and March 2020. ), is even worried about the “increase” in requests received each year to treat infected sites: + 10% for the past year, with 400,000 to 500,000 sites affected.
At this rate, the scammers do not hesitate to seize the feeling of distress of the inhabitants. Célia, a 26-year-old Parisian, paid the price. After discovering several bites on her body in her new home, the young woman calls the first specialist found on Google. “He came very quickly, without any tools. He looked gently at my mattress with the flashlight of his smartphone, and told me that I was 80% infected and that we had to react immediately”, she recalls. The man asks him for 80 euros in cash, before giving him an estimate at the “incredible” price. “Double what I had paid in my old apartment, which had also been infected”. After some hesitation, Celia refuses. Other specialists called a few days later confirmed to him that they had not spotted any bed bugs in his accommodation.
From Marseille, Katya Yakoubi protests against this type of scam. “One of our members lost more than 6000 euros, and is still not rid,” she laments. Because for some unscrupulous sellers, the bed bug has become a pest of golden eggs. Some “merchants” have even tried to convince the spokesperson, a figure in the fight against these parasites, to sell her image on their products. “Another company wanted me to speak publicly about its disinsection methods, and yet another wanted me to sell its anti-bedbug covers. Of course, I refused everything,” says Katya Yakoubi.
While 70% of people who have called on a professional say they were not satisfied with their intervention, and that the average cost spent to eradicate bedbugs reaches 1249 euros per household, specialists warn. “Unfortunately, bedbugs are very difficult to treat. It’s not a pschitt and then goes away… It is therefore better to prefer contracted companies”, argues Stéphane Bras. “You have to pay attention to the price offered and the means of eradication described: as soon as it’s more than 400 euros per passage for a chemical treatment, or you are told that everything can be finished in one go, beware- you”, recalls for his part Nicolas Roux de Bézieux, founder of the site Badbugs.fr. In 2021, the study carried out for its site by Ipsos recalled that the average time to get rid of bed bugs reached 2 and a half months.