by Benedetto Saraceno
and https://www.saluteinternazionale.info/2023/03/in-ricordo-di-franco-rotelli/
On Saturday 18 March 2023, in Trieste, hundreds of people attended the funeral of Franco Rotelli, one of the main protagonists of psychiatric reform in Italy.
Collaborator of Franco Basaglia, from 1979 to 1995, Rotelli was director of the Mental Health Department of Trieste. In 1998 he became General Manager of the Trieste Healthcare Company, a role he will hold for about ten years. For the PD he chaired the Health Commission of the FVG Region. He has been a consultant to WHO for the development of psychiatric reform in Argentina, Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
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At the end of my first month of volunteering in Trieste, as a young doctor, in 1976, one day I met Franco Rotelli, head physician of department F where I worked. As brusque as he usually was, he asked me how I supported myself and where I was staying. I slept in the hospital and, I told him, I lived on the money of my wife who remained in Milan. Rotelli took a bundle of crumpled banknotes out of his trouser pocket and took a few, a lot, and put them in my hand. He told me that he had just taken his salary and that it was a “communist repartition”. He walked away giggling. Thus began my long association with Franco Rotelli, first as an intimidated pupil and, later, as a friend, but also and always a pupil. For forty-seven years. I evoked that brusque gesture of generous goodness to recall Franco’s main virtue, goodness. Someone, perhaps many, let themselves be frightened by his abrupt intransigence, by the implacable conflict, by the harshness of many verbal confrontations. All of these, let us remember, were often pedagogical strategies and, at times, simple masks of his shyness. But all those forms of dialectical violence were always at the service of the search for the paths of the good and, I insist on using this word, of goodness. In fact, wickedness follows direct paths, travels fast and spreads like burning petrol and conquers hearts and minds by producing suffering, injustice and stupidity. On the contrary, the roads of goodness are tortuous, slow and tiring so that, with long times and painful work, they generate well-being, justice, freedom and beauty.
Because Franco Rotelli believed in this: that a daily, meticulous, tireless work had to be done, made up of encounters, attention, listening, curiosity, alliances and synergies. Franco Rotelli brought together the administrative common sense of Carlo Rotelli, his brother and beloved mayor of Casalmaggiore, and the discernment of Gian Giacomo Rotelli, his brother and Jesuit father. These qualities have shaped his extraordinary ability to build collaborative practices between people and institutions. Discernment, which “does not accept to submit to the slavery of the fear of choosing and knows it cannot entrust itself to a series of already written norms and behaviors…”, writes the Jesuit Rotelli himself, has accompanied, as an indispensable complement, the radical freedom by Franco Rotelli.
The freedom to imagine and put into practice the encounter and collaboration between different people, artists-doctors-craftsmen-users, to create synergies between healthcare and welfare, between administrative and technical, between private and public: they are all encounters and collaborations that were characterized by a decisive renunciation of defensively maintaining institutional separations, disciplinary separations and identities defined once and for all, and this in view of the Common Good. In fact, for Rotelli, it is a question of seeking the good that is in each and every one, with the aim of continually “kneading” the bread of goodness, justice, liberation and beauty. And, Rotelli tells us, all this can be done with simple common sense which, however, continues to declare tirelessly that the king is naked.
Together, once, forty-seven years ago, we looked for a man who lived and lived in the hospital in San Giovanni, a patient, an inmate, a user or whatever you want to call him. We were looking for him because he had been missing for days and Rotelli couldn’t rest. We found him in the attic of an uninhabited ward, hidden in the dark, frightened, a refugee. Franco, bending over the man, took him in his arms and, like a brother, said “But why… where have you come to hunt yourself” and spoke to him tenderly, happy to have found him again as if, in the end, this was always it is: to seek the other even when the painful events of life distance him, isolate him, make him disappear. Searching, rediscovering, bringing people back into the human community, with infinite patience, with respect and discretion, with the optimism of those who believe that there is good and it is a question of finding it, whatever the cost.
Rotelli’s was a political path in search of humanity and its continuous flowering, as if they were his beloved roses of San Giovanni. Take action to ease people’s pain and discomfort.
But it is necessary to operate outside psychiatry and good community services must be the last trench to avoid the normative and coercive stupidity of SPDC and residence psychiatry. It is necessary to activate networks of daily life, it is necessary to connect and synergize, as in a great mending, the myriads of crumbs of goodness, beauty and morality. Only from this collective “symphony” can political struggles arise, to build profound democracy, democracy from below. Politics has always been present in Franco’s life, as the indispensable vector for theories and practices of liberation to become visible and widespread.
Franco was skeptical about the possibility of a knowledge, and therefore a science, of subjectivity: do not pursue the chimera of a science of the subject because the subject remains unknowable. Rather, he was convinced of the need for a practice of bodies and needs. It is about welcoming, listening, treating kindly, proposing concrete ways that make everyday life less painful.
On Wednesday 8 March I spoke at length and for the last time with Franco Rotelli, together with other friends. When we were alone, when it was time to say goodbye, he said to me:
“If you treat yourself well, crazy people, yes, but also all the others, children, men and women, if you don’t get mean, then many things happen: needs emerge, desires are formulated, emotions are born”
Here, the practice of good-to-act-for-the-good, as a political project, as an engine generating affection, justice, freedom and beauty.
Benedetto Saraceno, Secretary General Lisbon Institute of Global Mental Health