Normality is a paved road: it is comfortable to walk on, but no flowers grow on it!
Vincent Van Gogh
I had the opportunity to visit the local services of Catanzaro and Lamezia Terme on the occasion of an event to which I was invited as a speaker for Mental Health Day 2023. The event was held on 11 November at the Musmi in Catanzaro and saw the participation of the Director of the “Diagnosis and Treatment Psychiatry Service” Michele Gabriele Rossi. The idea of the president of the Unasam “Libellula” Association, Natalia Barillari, and the president of the “Progetto Gedeone” Association, Antonio Mangiafave, was to relaunch phenomenology in the clinic and spread the ideals of the psychiatric reform work of Franco Basaglia as part of the “We are out of our minds” project, a prevention and awareness initiative for high schools, which will have as its central topic the theme of emotional care and education.
On November 10th I was at the SPDC in Lamezia Terme and I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Rossi about the current difficulties, the need to improve transition services between neuropsychiatry and psychiatry, and the importance of involving family members even at an older age. adult, as well as ongoing projects for REMS and post REMS. I was also able to visit the SPDC garden and learn about the project to improve the area in front of the structure. “The Garden of rediscovered thoughts”, this is the name given to the redeveloped space, wanted by Dr. Rossi, to give a different meaning to the stay of people hospitalized in psychiatry and their families. A place conceived as a “context” of well-being and “contact” with reality, in a vision of humanization of care and full recognition of the person and their fundamental rights, where it is possible to meet others and share initiatives and activities. The objective was to make “admission to psychiatry” less traumatic with the possibility of “welcoming” people and their families in an open context dedicated to initiatives of full inclusion and light-heartedness for the patients of the facility.
“To conquer the future you must first dream of it”, these are the words that Antonio Mangiafave tells me, who has been involved in the redevelopment, on a voluntary basis, of a space that was previously uncultivated and abandoned and is now a place of meeting and practice. Antonio tells me about the way this work was created, which was imagined as a place where people could take care of themselves, together with others. An opportunity to conceive other futures, the one I witnessed in the Psychiatry of Lamezia Terme, which immediately takes me back to the teaching of Franco Basaglia, and to that possibility of “inhabiting the threshold” created by the work of Reform, and which I often feel repeat by Peppe Dell’Acqua, Basaglia’s collaborator. Giving the person the opportunity to “inhabit the threshold” means creating a possibility for care that is based on the meeting of who is inside with the outside, and of who is outside with the inside; as happened between ’61 and ’72, first in Gorizia and then in Trieste, and immediately afterwards in many mental asylums, where the space around the mental asylums, previously closed, began to open up, becoming a park or a garden where the hospitalized they could finally go out and be free to meet others, talk and do things together.
There were many volunteers who contributed to the creation of the garden, including writers, service workers, doctors, writers, singers, gardeners, pastry chefs, musicians. SPDC Pediatrics DSMD, UEPE Carabinieri Forestali and Fattoria Sociale Miceli also collaborated. Director Rossi’s vision of community psychiatry is fundamental and the collaboration of third sector associations, such as Unasam, essential in the field of mental health.