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.
There are cases in which psychiatric medications save lives. It would be absurd to forget that. They can be a valuable tool, sometimes an indispensable one.
But today, unfortunately, they can sometimes seem to have become the only answer.
Or at least the answer that limited time and scarce resources often end up imposing.
Even on a specialist with the very best intentions.
Please, have a seat. I’m sorry, but we don’t have much time. Take half a tablet at 8 a.m., increase to one after a week, and you’ll see—it will all work itself out. See you in a month.
According to the World Health Organization, one in seven adolescents worldwide between the ages of 10 and 19 lives with a mental disorder. In Europe, the prevalence of mental disorders among children and adolescents aged 0 to 19 has increased significantly over the past fifteen years.
Despite advances in research and treatment, the data continue to show a growing prevalence of these disorders among younger people. How is that possible?
It is as though what is wrong, once able to remain submerged, is now finding more and more ways to surface.
But why?
Perhaps, in some cases, those symptoms are also a response.
But to what?
What if they were, at least in part, an attempt to be heard?
When the person in front of us does not listen to what we have to say, our voice changes. Its tone rises, the diaphragm tightens, and sometimes we find ourselves shouting, “I feel like I’m talking to a wall!”
Perhaps that is why, at times, the body ends up revealing what had long been boiling deep within.
To exist in the face of the advancing indifference of concrete.
To be seen.
To be understood.
Or at the very least, to stop being ignored.
Ignored by a part of the world increasingly absorbed by appearances, labels, and productivity. A world that, in its haste, has forgotten that there is such a thing as time—the time that belongs to each of us—and space, made of dreams and luminous hopes that can, unfortunately, sometimes be disappointed.
“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” wrote Saint-Exupéry.
Mental status examination: psychopathological condition stable. No psychomotor agitation. Good level of personal functioning.
Just as invisible was that cold bruise beneath tender skin that no one had noticed.
Like that dark shade that no one had seen in those eyes, just a little too light.
Or like that sad song that kept playing and playing… that no one had heard in the silent night.
Symptoms are trying to tell a story. They are the knots in a thread leading back to where it all began.
A story worthy of being heard.
Speaking of stories.
“You’re not really doomed as long as you’ve got a good story and someone to tell it to,” says Novecento, as his friend Tim recounts in The Legend of 1900.
But now we cannot help asking ourselves: who is that someone we can tell it to?
Because if we keep shouting at that wall, insisting, growing angry in the illusion that one day it will finally move, eventually one of two things may happen. Either we end up hurting ourselves, until our voice breaks from all the shouting. Or we surrender, putting that thread away in a drawer and, with it, everything we once had to say.
But how could you lock it away in a drawer—you, whose legs dreamed of running?
There is, however, a third path, one that is anything but paved, and it begins with two small words: What if...
What if, one day, exhausted and trembling though we may be, we stood there and reached out to touch the roughness of those materials, the lifeless silence of concrete, its palpable determination to remain exactly where it is. Monolithic.
And what if we chose to lift our eyes.
To look for someone able to resonate with us and answer us, someone who could make us feel alive inside like a forest. Someone who could make us fall in love with the color of wheat. Someone who could give us the deep breaths of the sea.
Can you imagine the colors that might be invented if they were truly allowed to blend?
How many poems could be written about a story that chose to look beyond that wall?
And how many adventures could begin beneath those “immense skies”, among “blue rivers, rolling hills, and open meadows”?
It is true, dear Battisti, that the courage to live takes time.
But once you find your thread again,
And the wind fills your sails,
It is born of itself.
Perhaps it was suggested to me one July morning.
Don’t ask me what year.
After all, July is the color of wheat.
Adriana Ferretti
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