There is a city within a city, and that is where those with mental problems move. Sometimes the separation between the healthy and the sick is marked by a clear boundary (psychiatric clinic, therapeutic community), but much more often the inhabitants of the two kingdoms share the same space without the healthy ones – who always lack a certain type of vision bit – realize it.
“I don’t understand how you manage to support yourself. How many crazy people are there in town?” Asks a girl to the psychiatrist invited to dinner by her parents. “Let’s see”, replies the psychiatrist, “let’s try to count how many there are in this building”. “There is only the madman on the third floor, the one who speaks for himself”, replies the interlocutor too certain. “Is there a thin, thin girl who looks like a skeleton?” Inquires the psychiatrist. “Giovanna, on our landing”, replies the young woman. “Now I want to know, isn’t there a hollowed-out gentleman who comes out a little, never opens the door, is very quiet and doesn’t even push himself on the balcony all dirty with pigeon shit?”. “Yes, Silvio, on the third floor”. “Got the paranoid”, replies the psychiatrist, “let’s move on to the depressed. Have you ever heard a neighbor say: let’s not go to the beach, my wife is in bed?”. “Yes, top floor”. “Only one depressed? Let’s pretend that it is. Don’t tell me that in the whole building there isn’t an old woman who tears her up and throws things out of the window?”. “Actually there are two”, replies the girl involuntarily censoring Alzheimer’s cases as well. “You see”, concludes the psychiatrist, “if everyone was cured I could support myself with this building alone”.
We are the girl unaware of what is happening in her condominium. The psychiatrist who undermines his certainties with maieutics is Paolo Milone, author of The art of binding people, one of the most beautiful, unusual and poetic literary works on mental illness of recent years. Born in Genoa in 1954, Milone worked in a Mental Health Center, then in an emergency psychiatry ward. The latter – renamed in the book Department 77 – is the observatory from which Milone recounts his forty-year experience, at the same time it is a customs passage, the “magic room” where the healthy and the sick exchange passports for a few moments by hiring a hand to hand without which, perhaps, all humanity would be lost.
“The vast world of psychiatry opens up when you get close to two meters from the patient. If you get close to the meter, it becomes phantasmagoric. If you get closer, it becomes hell.” The psychiatrist’s task is to go down to that hell every day to help those who live there, but also to cross a place where emotions – as well as some survival strategies, the art of deception and manipulation – are pushed to the maximum, bringing the healthy in contact with something fundamental that has always belonged to him, but that (night dreams excluded) they would not find anywhere else.
With a wise choice Milone uses a style that puts free verse at the service of pure narration – he can remember The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Master -, thus effectively summarizing in two hundred pages what otherwise would have required twice as much. Pure emotion, non-trivial insights, some provocation, you never get bored. We follow the narrator in the most critical moments of his profession but also in the routine phases, the bureaucracy, the friendly colleagues, the careerists without depth, the struggles between the different schools of thought, the noble school of emergency psychiatry nurses , the perception that others have of those dealing with mental illness, which is always a little distorted.
The center of the book remains the relationship with patients, their lives outside and inside medical care, their holding on to life or letting it go (the pages on suicide are among the most touching), the outbursts of anger, the collapses , and then the hope, the devastating sweetness, the relapses, the emotional, intellectual, sentimental bond (the verb in the infinitive of the title is not just about restraint) that the psychiatrist establishes with them. Mental illness as an exercise in otherness (“to deny the existence of madness by saying that we are all equal is to cancel the diversity of the other, making everything gray. In the asylum age the madmen were excluded from the cities, today they are excluded from the mind: absolute stigmatization “), and as a subversive state (” those who are sad leave the house a little, and spend less than those who are happy. The ideal for the consumer society is everyone happy and none sad “).
Then there is Genoa, told in the twentieth century in a unique way by poets and songwriters, then plunged into oblivion, and here again in the limelight as the ideal theater of representation. There are the happy measurements of space (“in the historic center of Genoa, the largest squares are the interiors of churches, sometimes, to get around the city it is better to enter from one nave and exit from the other”) and the way in which that space falls on the spirit of those who live there (“Cesare, stop giving antidepressants to all the Genoese you meet. It’s true, the Genoese all complain, but they are not depressed. The grumbling has its canons, it’s popular music. secular blues, which speaks of man’s effort but does not seek any salvation “).
The art of binding people is a unique book in the Italian panorama. By shape, object of excavation, capacity for investigation, art of paradox. If I mentioned Spoon River I also did it with a provocative spirit because, in this ballad of the salty sea, from which kingdom the living come and from which the dead is never entirely clear.
The book. The art of connecting people by Paolo Milone is published by Einaudi (pages 191, € 18.50)
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