The Mental Health Forum is another of the precious creatures that Franco Rotelli helped bring into being. These pages, it couldn’t have been otherwise, welcomed the first emotions and then the memories and again the reflections on what so many of us proudly and ruefully want to remember. The commitment to keep this square alive and open also comes from the often critical and difficult discussions that we had with Franco up until the last few days. The writings that have arrived in these days in the editorial staff below to give voice to the Forum square.
From today, after “Attilia’s cigarettes”, the other contributions.
by Luigi Benevelli
Immediately after ’68 I met and got to know Franco Rotelli in Castiglione delle Stiviere, at the beginning of his work as a psychiatrist. He had been assigned by the Director to a male section of the local criminal asylum: murderers, mobsters, rapists, swindlers, insane criminals.
Franco stayed for hours in the Department, he did not leave in the morning immediately after a hurried visit as did most of the older and “expert” colleagues who stayed for a while in the Department Head’s closet to get the “news” or at the most they made a quick “round” in the living room escorted by robust nurses. I remember that the “sick” could not get close. to the doctor, but at most “request a visit”, a one-way meeting that usually focused on the “treatments”, the symptoms and their progress,
A radical laceration of the rules of asylum everyday life occurred when, during service hours, Franco he decided to stop and eat in the ward, sitting down at the table with the internees, with the same menu as theirs: many nurses, embarrassed, without orders, no longer knew where to stand, what to do, how to move because out of discipline and respect they could not contest and dismiss the doctor, but at the same time they had to protect him from contact with naturally violent people. Head doctors, other colleagues, many nurses were horrified by a behavior that questioned working styles, stereotypes, ways of relating to inmates that Franco had begun to treat as “people” with whom one could eat together, converse, even talk how to improve the quality of everyday life for everyone eas it happened, to be able to Also to make it. Not proclamations, but simple gestures of cordiality, within the reach and availability of everyone, even those who have not studied
The scene stuck in my eyes.
Throughout his life Franco never stopped working for the redemption and dignity of people “marked” by fate and by life. With courage, severity, determination, lucid intelligence, generosity.