“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“And what could not be explained, not even by a fervent imagination, disturbed the necessary order.”
This is not a book, but a meeting.
First of all, the meeting of the author, Francesca Valente, with her friend and psychiatrist Luciano Sorrentino.
Then it is the meeting with a topic, that of mental health, which always creates some problems for public attention: we act a bit like with the mad, we say “yes, yes, it’s fine” and then we turn our heads the other way as quickly as possible. Problem filed away. But, and above all, it is the meeting with the “mad people” of the Repartino, that is, one of the first experiments in Italy of an open ward, born in Turin after the promulgation of Law 180 which imposed the closure of mental hospitals.
These are profound and significant meetings: Valente recovers four years of “rapportini”, those unofficial documents through which doctors and nurses exchanged informal information on the progress of the ward; between one notation and another, thanks to long conversations with Sorrentino, he reconstructs the stories of the patients, but also of the nurses and of Sorrentino himself. Because, as he well underlines in the introduction, in those pages there is “a humanity that tells of another humanity, with benevolence and a sincere effort of understanding”.
The question we ask ourselves, however banal, is what sense there could be today in recovering events linked to a historical-social period as defined as that of the so-called Basaglia Law. This is explained by be and the podcast “Tutta colpa di Basaglia” along which the parallel story of those years and the declinations that psychiatric support takes on today unfolds in ways that are sometimes very divergent from each other. Many of Basaglia’s teachings, as emerges from the book, were not and are not easy to apply, especially what was the first and fundamental cornerstone of that revolution: respecting the patient’s will and his freedom of choice.
The portraits that Valente offers us are sweet, sometimes heartbreaking, always: very human. It does not trivialize the suffering, the mental distress of patients, the difficulties of nurses; above all it does not trivialize the individual and collective history, rather it makes it an essential contextual cause to understand the full extent of that epochal change. They are never lives narrated in a vacuum – the very vacuum around those who face mental distress (which sometimes, if you look closely, is “only” a profound manifestation of intolerance towards a context that is completely or partially misaligned with legitimate desires and needs) is one of the main factors of recrudescence and chronicity of the sick. The community, the non-isolation, the listening to the human desire for love and recognition emerge from these pages with delicacy and participation, without professorial tones or accusations, but as a necessary testimony.
“It was so that no one would forget” writes the author referring to the tenacious archivism of the nurse Tornior. And so the question returns but is followed by a crystal-clear answer: let us read this book so as not to forget these lives and their battles, but also to use them as a compass in the midst of still very stormy winds.
Written by Delis
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Francesca Valente, Altro nulla da segnalare, Einaudi, Torino, 2022