The answer cannot be “Discipline and Punish”. It cannot be in general, as specifically, above all, as regards the world of psychiatry.
And yet, it seems to me that, faced with increasingly pressing, increasingly complex questions – questions that start from the grassroots, from people who experience suffering, hardship, poverty, precariousness, isolation, stigma, abandonment, confinement, and even violence, the decision-makers, the Authorities linked to power (but also to operational responsibilities!) of the political, administrative, managerial, medical world, often respond in the “simplest”, easiest but least acceptable way.
The issues inherent in the complexity of mental health are removed; the implementation of all those multiple, diversified, multidisciplinary practices, certainly demanding but repeatedly tested as effective and decisive, which can build progressive stages of improvement, possible, acceptable, dignified, responsible life forms are cancelled. In short, suffocating all those practices which, as has been abundantly demonstrated, can achieve a desired well-being / well-being, with many faces.
Thus, also in the name of a homogenizing, illiberal normality, the doors are closed and a clear separation is created between an “inside” and an “outside”.
An “inside” for the mentally ill, thus defined by objectifying diagnoses and, by now, also by predictive algorithms, linked to technological reports, to interventions produced with the use of artificial intelligence. An “out” for the so-called healthy.
I see these closed doors, I observe them in their concreteness, every time I take the bus in front of the Mental Health Center, under my territorial jurisdiction, where, before the pandemic/syndemia, I found the psychiatric doctors of reference, who had me in load.
Back then you could count on low-threshold access, 24/7, without the torment of any waiting list.
Today, the barred doors, the deserted garden, are a real metaphor. A painful metaphor of the involution we are witnessing, we people with experience and our families.
But we don’t give up. We are all involved in a public mobilization, to which some media, newspapers, televisions, as well as some political and trade union forces are also listening in part. An active presence in the field that gives voice to real, multiple, complex needs; it gives voice to pressing questions, which rightly ask for adequate and immediate answers.
And there is a struggle to obtain medical and psychosocial care based on “human” values and practices, referring to a “Community Mental Health“. While we proclaim that the Public Health guaranteed by the Italian Constitution is a tangible and intangible asset and as such it must be realized as a mandatory priority objective, because it concerns all citizens, because, evidently, we are all at risk
Without health, we will never stop repeating it, we are all powerless, unable. We all are, the sick as well as the presumed healthy…