Lost and Found: Difficult road ahead for boy who went missing six years ago

A British teenager who resurfaced in France six years after his disappearance could return home this weekend. French authorities say that although Alex Batty appears 'fragile,' he shows no signs of physical damage from his missing years.

But the psychological damage will be more difficult to assess.

"It's very hard to quantify or even describe what he is going to have to confront over the next few years," says psychotherapist and author Stella O'Malley. "Because when you've experienced something as bizarre and tragic as he has, you don't find your tribe. You don't find other people who've also experienced it. So you can feel incredibly isolated and lonely."

Alex was 11-years-old and under the legal guardianship of his grandmother when he went on holiday with his mother and grandfather in 2017. They never brought him back. Instead, Alex spent the next six years in a nomadic spiritual commune obsessed with solar panels, living in remote valleys without any schooling while his old friends were going to class and socializing over Tiktok and Snapchat.

O'Malley says the lack of education and technology on the commune will widen the gap between the 17-year-old and his peers.

"Technology has gone so fast in these few years and he is of a generation where they have grown up with this. So he'll feel yet again feel isolated. Again and again, he'll feel a sense of panic, thinking 'I can't! I can't integrate!'"

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Alex made the decision to leave the commune when his mother told him the two of them were about to move to Finland. He escaped and had been walking through the forest 'for days' when a truck driver saw him on the side of a rain-swept road and offered him a lift. Alex borrowed the driver's phone to send his grandmother a Facebook message, telling her he wanted to come home.

When he returns, Alex must be given the time and space needed to process what has happened to him, O'Mally says, warning that there's no magic formula for rebuilding lives that have been disrupted in this way.  But she believes that with the right support, he can go on to live a normal life. 

"Love and warmth get you a long way. And the kind of simple pleasures of life can help in a very gentle way. They can get you a lot further than complicated, sophisticated psychological strategies."

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