“The road ahead is neither easy nor safe. But it must be travelled, and it will be.”

Blue. There is nothing else around me. A deep, intense blue that, as I lower my gaze, swallows every trace of sunlight and grows darker. It isn’t black. There are blades of light, long, bright rays that, through some strange trick of refraction, seem to be shining up at me from below. I know they aren’t. I know the sun is behind me, somewhere up at the surface.

Images of the thousands of boys and girls arriving in Ceuta have gone around the world, demonstrating once again how the web is capable of making its borders disappear.

Beginning in the 1950s, during an era shaped by psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories, the first psychiatric medications began to be introduced.

In a book I am currently reading, “Strangers to Ourselves” by Rachel Aviv, the author tells us that, in those years, whenever a psychiatrist became interested in biological research—that is, in understanding mental disorders through the neurological and biochemical functioning of the brain—they were, in some circles, regarded as “a peculiar case, perhaps burdened by emotional conflicts that made them incapable of confronting real feelings.” It makes me smile a little to read those words today, when, in some settings, almost the opposite can happen.