- Luigi Trabucchi, psychiatrist. In 1974 he graduated from the classical high school. He received his medical education at the University of Padua (one of the oldest and most respected universities in Europe), on October 28, 1982 he received a Diploma. On November 11, 1987, he graduated from the University of Verona, Department of Psychiatry. Worked as a clinical psychiatrist for over thirty years. He has been teaching psychiatry in courses for medical professionals for over 15 years. Help for the elderly at Villa Santa Chiara Nursing Home. Luigi is President of the Italian Association of Private Physicians and National Secretary of the Italian Society for Psychiatric Care. For more than 15 years he has been a teacher at the OSS School for Social and Medical Workers. In 2018, he published a text for caregivers and family members called Help for Mental Illness. In 2015, he published an essay on the history of the San Giacomo Psychiatric Hospital in Verona titled: Cherubino Trabucchi and Verona Ed Sierre Verona Psychiatric Hospital. He published a number of articles on the history of psychiatry and psychiatric clinics.
Can you give us a summary of how the scientific and practical approach to mental illness has changed in Italy over the last 10-20 years?
The human sciences to which Medicine and Psychiatry belong are linked to the Man who lives in the history and reality of the moment. Hence the fact that changes in human life, understood in a broader sense, lead to new hardships and new needs. Diseases are all affected by different external experiences, for example we know how pandemics have affected human history from Roman times to today. This happens all the more in the psychic sphere.
In the first half of the last century, psychiatry has gone from a biological view to a psychological and therefore social view of mental illness. The 1970s and 1980s integrated these dimensions into a unitary perspective, putting an end to the conflicts between fans of different concepts.
Subsequently, there were the advent of the computer, the globalization of knowledge, a scientific prevalence of the Anglo-Saxon technocratic mentality, a cultural inability to address problems in a broad and multifactorial way, which exasperated the need and importance of classifications. It therefore seems easy to understand that a generation of psychiatrists was formed in total adherence to the US diagnostic classification of the DSM in its subsequent versions III, IV and V. Such an exasperation of the value of the classifications has led to a marked attention of the same and consequently the diagnosis has taken on the connotations of an “objective reality”, a reification of the same, losing sight of the reality of real people who meet in the clinic.
However, the comparison with real people has slowly shown how this diagnosis / clinical reality syllogism was totally inadequate. The 360-degree reality of the clinic and the need to put together different diagnoses to describe and approach the single individual, to represent the real world of patients, has called all this into question.
The last 20 years of the 21st century have thus seen a rift between Institutional and Academic Psychiatry related to the diagnosis of DSM and the concrete work of those who work in the field and in the trenches, who need to understand and treat health problems and existential unease of the real Man. A deep furrow has been dug from theory to practice.
The academy always pursues particular attention to diagnostics, but in practice it has been seen that most of the needs of customers are needs related to a multifactorial existential distress, which involves social, work, emotional, economic, housing aspects.
There are more and more people who have a personality disorder of various kinds: insecure, obsessive, with identity, emotional and relationship disorders or borderline disorders. Such personalities struggle to fit in and remain in an increasingly competitive, complex society that requires unbridled efficiency and, vice versa, does not know how to give certainties, serenity and respect to those who are more fragile.
The problems of work, safety, future prospects and a solid family reality that are increasing day by day, jeopardize the serenity, harmony of daily life and certainties for the future.
Whether there is a personal difficulty at the base or that this is consequent to the events of life, everything leads to discomfort and mental disorders, which in the end become the object of observation of psychiatry that truly works among the people. In this context, the work of the psychiatrist certainly cannot be exhausted with strictly medical tools, but many other social options would be needed that are not there. Those who work in mental and social distress, which are now almost two sides of the same coin, would need subsidies, housing, sheltered work, work for young people, communities, training. They are realities that in fact exist organizationally, there are also in reality, but then numbers, bureaucratic problems, a guaranteeing legislation, which sometimes leaves freedom of decision to the person who is often unable to determine himself, and the usual lack of funds all easy on paper, but difficult in the concrete to operate daily.
Thus we arrive at the frustration and the so-called revolving door of the hospital admission, where the person, the illness, the disturbed and disturbing behavior are put in order and then the doors are reopened and everything starts again because the problem is not addressed and solved. at the base, with the appropriate time and skills.
Fortunately, the good will, the passion of those who work has always saved or patched up the boat. Now, however, Covid, the fatigue of work, stress and increasing costs in the face of increasingly limited resources, have highlighted the shortcomings of a training program for new health personnel who should replace those who leave, leaving few the effort to to make up for a job that has grown in quantity, in stress, in the disappointment of impotence.
Covid with its uncertainties between prevention, mortality, vaccine yes and vaccine no, but above all Dr. Google have added conflict to the already reduced trust of people in healthcare. The doctor-patient relationship of trust no longer exists, now the client’s claim to obtain what he “KNOWS” is already the best diagnosis and cure for the disease that he already knows completely because he is documented.
As was the case in the past for different disabilities, mental illnesses were also disturbing elements that it was better to isolate, hiding them from the eyes of the people. This created in ordinary people a sense of estrangement, if not almost fear, of what they did not know. Has the common perception changed to date?
To respond to this, we must make a leap into legislation that has a circular value, of cause and effect of a culture.
The Middle Ages gave a religious significance, such as the presence of the evil one, to alienation, diversity and disturbing behavior. In the modern age, however, the search for a scientific interpretation comes into play: to understand where and why there is a vulnus in the brain, which was then begun to be understood as the organ responsible for the functions of the mind. This is how shelters and kindergartens for the insane were born throughout Europe that allow you to study, classify in order to be able to cure.
In 1904, psychiatric assistance was regulated in Italy with the official institution of asylums (which later became the Provincial Psychiatric Hospitals). That law, however, incorporates a cultural concept that is not very sanitary, the treatments were still almost nil, and, vice versa, left room for a culture that was still very defensive from mental illness and consequently much more predisposed to custody and social and judicial social guarantee, than to treatment. of the person.
The law of 1904 established that people affected by mental alienation, for whatever cause, were to be “kept and cared for” when they are “dangerous to themselves or to others, or become public scandal” and are not or cannot be conveniently kept and cared for except in asylums.
It was a law which, while requiring the requirement of mental alienation, associated it with danger and public scandal, thus mixing medical elements with elements of public safety. If we then observe the purpose of the intervention, that is, to guard and treat the mentally ill, this of custody immediately appears prevailing and a priority already in the diction.
In 1968 there is a small revision of the organization of psychiatric hospitals in a more sanitary sense, voluntary hospitalization is established and, in this case, the obligation to record the hospitalization in the criminal record is abolished. The disease is recognized in its own right beyond the social behavior and the request for health by the person, without police mediation.
Law 180 of 1978 radically modifies psychiatric assistance, bringing it back to the health sector only, considering intervention in the territory as central and no longer the hospital one. In the territory it cannot be kept, but only cured.
This conception immediately merged into the Health Reform Law 833 of December 1978; speaking of 833/78, for the parts relating to Psychiatry, is equivalent to speaking of 180.
Normally the law acknowledges the common feeling, but is the opposite always true as well?
We can say that in the years from ’45 to ’90 of the last century, years in which the Christian spirit, of the common good, of the US, this conception of changing psychiatric care by favoring decentralization, humanization, health care improvement, care in every sense of these poor people, it was also present quite widely in the Italian population.
The years at the turn of the century and especially the 2000s, on the other hand, saw individualism, the ego, self-referentiality grow in an increasingly disruptive and important way.
Consequently, the psychiatric patient, but also the geriatric, the disabled, the less efficient, even the child, has returned to being the disturbing one, the one who prevents him from going to work, earning, growing in social position and, above all, to have fun, to go and enjoy a well-deserved rest on the weekend, on holidays, to go out for dinner or spritz with friends. The right to my enjoyment, my free time is sacred! This trend towards marginalization, the rejection of the disturbing relative is still maintained today and has brought to light the parental problem defined as the “after us”.
I would like to add here a chronicle of February 2022 from Verona which expresses very well today’s thinking on the figure of the different potential psychiatric patient.
A homeless man, who comes from an oriental country, sleeps at night and has “lived” for years in an ancient funerary Ark attached to a church in the center of Verona. Too bad that every now and then he lights a fire and obviously risks doing considerable damage to the Ark and the Church. This individual spends the day drinking alcohol so he is also drunk almost 24 hours a day and is not very “friendly”. On Wednesday 9 February he lights the usual fire and a quarrel ensues with the neighboring inhabitants. It also emerges that, in the absence of toilets, he makes his needs regardless of who passes, women and children who are. An article of news and protest comes out in the Verona newspaper, with an urgent request to psychiatry to intervene with the Mandatory Health Treatment due to… danger and public scandal. So we see that the concept of danger, repealed in 1978, is still alive in 2022 in popular culture and journalists.
The madman is to be tied up, but psychiatrists cannot tie. The conception of psychiatry as the “social washing machine” dies hard.
In many conversations with parents or adults, both in Italy and here in Kazakhstan, a recurring element is the notation that “today’s young people” are more fragile than they once were. From your professional experience but also from the purely human one, do you believe that these are part of the eternal and normal generational conflicts, or do they underline a real problem? That is, that young people today are less “equipped” to face life in its most critical aspects?
The historical period that we have lived in Europe from 1945 to today has been a rather extraordinary period as there has been an overall improvement in the quality of life and a long peace without wars, as has rarely, if ever, happened in the past. So we have to put the themes we are talking about in the story.
Obviously without making generalizations, but only as a metaphor to make myself understood, we can compare these seventy or eighty years to a great restaurant.
Those born in the 1930s and 1940s built the walls of the house, those born in the 1950s furnished and equipped it and bought food, those born in the 1960s lit the fires, cooked and ate. Those born in the 1970s and 1980s ate with gusto, leaving some dessert and coffee for those of 1990.
Then the 2000s have “cleared up” and now the 2010s and 2020s seem destined for the function of cleaning and looking for a way to eliminate the garbage left by the “parents”.
Can we say that everyone has had the same life experience and gratification in the restaurant service? No! All this always reaffirming that we are simplifying and that in all generations there have been excellent and hardworking people.
If we think of the young people of the Movement that characterized 1968 and insert them in history, we discover that those young people were born in the years immediately after the war, so in 1968 they were in their twenties and thirties. Their parents had experienced the drama, the hardships and fears of war, occupation and the Resistance and the enthusiasm of reconstruction. All that spirit, those experiences could not have been passed on to the next generation. The educational concepts and their life were impregnated with words such as: freedom, homeland, commitment, politics, ideals, work, equality, with difficulty rebuilding a social, economic role, respect for others and whatever else we can imagine. Not to mention the high human values.
After that time, in the following decades there has been a progressive withdrawal to a lesser social and political commitment, to an ever-increasing disinterest in society and common life, the sacred. This experience of extraneousness has led young people to other more individualistic, more hedonistic, more superficial and self-centered interests. Generation after generation, the idea of the US has been lost and the importance, the value, the search for the ego has grown, which has become dominant in putting one’s own interest, one’s own gratification and having everything in front of everything. and immediately. A generation has appeared that grew up with the myth of consumerism, of fun, of buying new, of the latest model, but all for me. An increasingly self-referential generation unable to see each other, to meet in dialogue, but more eager to impose their own self and their own idea. It seems that the more one does one’s own interests, the more one’s advantages, the more one speaks of common interest, of community, of convergence. Words and reality run on opposing paths.
We have seen, again, and I fear not for the last time, these difficulties and this self-referential clash in the elections of the President of the Republic 2022. The reason for the defeat was to say NO to every proposal of the other, associated with wanting to take charge of the victory, not of compromise or sacrifice for the much-proclaimed convergence. If there had not been the few seniores of politics who survived the scrapping in the name of the renewal of politics, where would we have ended up with the various fifties of the parties?
The relationship between parents and children has loosened and the transmission of the fundamental values of Man has no longer been transmitted, but the example that says “think for yourself”, “take and use yourself, without looking at others” has been passed. . Adults do not have the time, interest and desire to take care of educating, they sleep busy working and having fun. The school, the Society, the State, the Church, the “educational agencies” must take care of young people.
Can these 30-year-olds, more or less five, be equipped like previous generations to face the current phase?
Can twenty-year-olds be serene when they see a world (as in the restaurant metaphor) where there is everything to clean and redo without having anything in the cash, if not debts?
I see two different ages, with all the enormous nuances between them.
There are those unable to face life, a life now more tiring, degrading and with less hope, as they have not had the training to do so. The parents gave them everything, they considered them as an enlarged IO, and therefore part of themselves, to be gratified rather than educated. Now they also find themselves competing with young immigrants who, on the other hand, have the desire and willingness to commit themselves to integrate, grow, elevate themselves.
Then there are the younger ones who are angry because they find themselves in a precarious world. This anger, however, gives him the desire and the energy to fight to restore the rubble that previous generations have left. They have not “tasted the dessert, the ice cream and the coffee”, they have only heard about them and are ready to roll up their hands to take back what they have lost in the story of life. Obviously they are more “pissed” and therefore more competitive.
The misfortune is that they often do not know the Human values, of living together civilly, and, in this lack of knowledge and education, they resurface and use the ancestral ones of competition, struggle, survival and move in a herd according to those instinctive ways, the sun they know and which have been transmitted to them by animal nature itself: Whoever hits first, hits twice and wins. The strongest dominates the others.
Grandparents are the only ones who have ethical and social values, they could and should transmit their wisdom, their stories and make them understand the Human and just way of living in society. But the children have pushed them away to retirement homes or relegated to their homes, they are the first not to consider them and the old ones themselves are tired and afflicted and therefore resigned to seeing their world disappear.
However, none of this eliminates or mitigates the generational conflict or the disastrous experience of social withdrawal that the pandemic has created. A beautiful cake requires many ingredients, all of which are fundamental, albeit in different measures, so the current reality is affected by so many histories, cultures, economic and organizational aspects of society and time and all together contribute to determining the actors of today.
And now a hot topic for the whole world. The pandemic. The general climate, in some dramatic moments, the restrictions, the abandonment of habits and meaningful relationships, distance learning. Did all this increase the rise of mental illness? Has the number of people who turn to a specialist for the onset of psychological problems increased? How is the health system responding? And what are the forms that best meet the needs of people today.
I am convinced that the pandemic is a great problem for man today, but also a comfortable and large carpet under which to hide the dust of so many difficulties and errors that were already in the making, but had not exploded. The alibi of the pandemic allows us to shift the focus and the blame for what is not right and create discomfort in the world in which we live. We want to believe that our problems do not depend on decades of our individualistic choices, unbridled economy, educational deficiencies, subjective interpretation of important words and the foundation of civil life, such as: freedom, self-determination, individual and collective responsibility, secularization, obligations and much more. Today, everything is blamed on a Covid virus and its interference in our society over the past two years. I think it is a good defense that we are giving ourselves by diverting collective responsibilities.
Let’s see for example the division between si vax and no vax, in favor of and against the vaccine. If we see it specifically, it seems obvious that this division is linked to the virus and its vaccine, but at the same time to address this we should neglect, forget and pretend that they did not exist, many other ideological radicalizations that up to two years ago led to the contrast between for and against. The conflict, the division and the clash between different souls existed much earlier. Think, for example, of the other mandatory vaccinations, the High Speed, the Apulian oil pipeline, the opening against the closure of the borders, just to name a few more famous and recent, striking and widespread. In history yes … against no … we find thousands of them. Every novelty in every country, even the smallest fraction, has always seen the clash, not between ideas, but between opposing ideologies. In the human soul, the clash is more present than the encounter, we always find a Peppone and a Don Camillo, and not only now, certainly not because of the “fault” of the Virus.
However, the fact remains that the pandemic has put us, as it has always been in history, to cause disasters and to modify human life. Smallpox in Roman times, the Plague first for the Romans and then in the 17th century, the Spanish at the beginning of the 20th century, just to name a few pandemics, have changed and influenced history. Not only do diseases affect history, if we think that Napoleon, who says history was a great strategy calculator, could not deal with the explosion of a volcano whose ashes cooled the climate in Russia just when he he went “to visit” us with his troops and this favored its defeat.
Surely Covid has interrupted socialization, communication and what little discussion and dialogue there was, the already reduced serenity of always living in a hurry, always having as its value work inextricably linked to the economy and not to the identity and dignity of the Person himself, even less as a service to the community, and we could dwell on it.
Surely the virus has suspended everyone’s hope in the future and the ability and possibility to look forward with confidence, projecting our life plans over time beyond today. If you ask a boy “what do you want to do with yourself in the future?”, It emerges that the idea of the future is even more obscure, precarious and uncertain than a few years ago. The future is …, according to the period, the weekend, the last of the year or the summer holidays. Today it is also aggravated by the fear of what tomorrow will be, which Covid has actually mortgaged more and more.
The old people have seen the idea of spending their retirement peacefully with friends changed and according to the projects they had made, those of the middle age, with their disengaged and hedonistic way of life, have seen the myth of the Spritz interrupted. and dinners (!!) and the “freedom” to do what you want and like, young people have seen the experience of the “first times” suspended, sociality, friendship, love and delaying the end of training and beginning of professional life and their entry into the social and adult world.
In addition to everything that concerns individuals, we must add aspects that involve society as a whole, but to which we belong individually: enormous public debt, economic losses of companies and workers, economic commitments of the State, with completely inadequate politicians and unable to face the sacrifice necessary for recovery. All difficulties that affect the daily life of many.
On the psychological and psychopathological level, the loss of the future and hope lead to a discomfort that results in addiction, immobility and a malaise that occurs, among other manifestations, also in excessive listening to somatic signals, in a continuous circle between listening anxious about somatic disturbances and somatizations of anxiety. Eating disorders, bulimia and anorexia are growing in this context.
In loneliness, in the lack of meaning of everyday life, then one seeks entertainment and gratification in substance abuse, in games, in virtual reality and in a world made of gratification in phony excitement.
Frustration then opens the door to real psychopathology with an increase in the problems that arise in the fragility of the personality and therefore: depression, anxiety disorders, suicidal ideation, escape and emotional research in self-harm, in increasingly precocious aggression.
Fear of the other increases conflict and persecutory thoughts of a paranoid type or psychotic disorganization of the person.
All this leads to distrust, not to “see” a future and to the experience of feeling without a guide, a point of reference that gives hope.
This lack of reference points, if it is important for Man in all ages, is even more so for the young person in training towards life. The young person needs to deal with a guide, with stakes, if we want him to find a right path and a way in life. Today the world of adults, as parents and as a society, is taken by himself and is often in confusion himself, how can he be a guide for others? Often then, without generalizing, parents have only an individual vision of their children, as of an enlarged self, and therefore satisfy them in their requests and not in their needs. They gratify them and fill them with things more than with listening, attention and affection, thus becoming not very credible as valid and greater figures to follow or, worse, they become negative models. The result is a weakness in transmitting to subsequent generations with words and, even more so, with testimony, human values such as: respect for others, attention, social value, and the meaning of the other who is different from oneself. There is also a lack of education in the meaning and gravity of one’s actions and their consequences, where this should derive from an early age from underlining individual responsibilities and underlining the seriousness of inadequate, disrespectful and, even more so, anti-social behavior. , antisocial, violent against people and damage to the things of others and their own. The young person must learn to recognize the evil done and truly ask forgiveness from his victim. But this requires a true awareness of the negativity of one’s actions.
Are today’s adults grown up and surrounded by their own I, made up of my rights, of the prevalence of my thoughts over yours, of self-referentiality able, can they transmit these values and this awareness? When we see parents who go to attack teachers because they gave their children a bad grade or marital assaults, or … our politicians unable to say yes to an idea, perhaps a good one, only because it is proposed by another party, what testimony do we have? ? I’m right you are wrong and I can defend this truth even by destroying you through social media, physically or on things that belong to you, etc.
This vision of the ego as master of the world is also the basis of the so-called femicide. You woman are my thing and you belong to me and only to me. I manage your freedom, your spaces, your time, therefore, in full, your life also belongs to me. Here is an example that explains why not everything derives from Covid, but from years of exasperation of the concept of individual above all, freedom, or rather selfishness, individual above all. Surely Covid, the forced closure at home, together, a restriction of the freedom to be together with relatives, friends and some obligatory behaviors, have highlighted as a litmus test what already existed problematic.
The world of adults has abdicated the possibility and effort of educating, it is no longer capable of assuming the burden and responsibility of transmitting the founding values of the social community through words and example. However, even children have a need for values, for codified and distinctive rules, for limits and, where the adult world does not teach it, the herd takes over with its rules and meanings.
The so-called “peer group” has always been fundamental and important for young people, more than any other educational agency. At one time this group had control over the parents, the school, the parish because it took place either in their presence or in controlled and known living environments. Now this scholastic or parish reality or “healthy” environments, with profound values, have gone into crisis, not as an institution, but due to the lack of those human and social meanings in society of civil life and living together in the community of men.
Without those references spontaneous groups were born, self-managed groups where the strongest, the winner, in the almost zoological sense, appears to be the guide.
Here I quote the thoughts of Amedeo Bezzetto: psychologist and psychotherapist in charge of the adolescent area of the Villa Santa Giuliana Verona hospital. “Unfortunately, the baby gang is perfect for teenagers who find an unmissable proposal in more or less organized groups, especially when school, associations, and families are missing or inadequate”. “The baby gang is a form of making friends, and friendship is an essential component for teenagers, one of the basic requirements for growing up. The proposition of these organizations works all right, albeit in the wrong way. The shape is perfect for a teenager, even if the substance is not good. They are groups in which one learns from each other and experiences one another, pre-adolescents or adolescents prefer peers or slightly older children as a reference, rather than educators or families. “
Again: “We are used to thinking that psychological pain in males is discharged through actions and in females in thoughts, but it could be that we are instead witnessing a sort of gender equality in this area as well”.
“Listening is fundamental, but with children already in difficult situations it is complicated, I believe that mutual help between families is important.” For this reason “I would aim to offer training in parenting, to meet and reflect on what adolescents are like, on relational dynamics and on their requests.” (Amedeo Bezzetto)
Covid with its clauses, deprivation of liberties with subsequent failure to satisfy necessary needs, has favored a surge in these worlds, these associations and groups of young people without any control, making the social system necessary and useful. No more friendships, groups, real exchanges, but virtual ones. In these groups I can show all of myself without filters or fears of and for my real person, I can hide what creates problems for me and present myself as the winner, which maybe I am not. The encounter between people becomes an encounter and / or clash between virtual individuals and follows the same methods as cartoon heroes. Not always all bad, but always all strong, powerful, winning. The virtual, however, already dominated by remote schooling and an excessive invasion of life, is tired, does not surprise and no longer satisfies young people. And here instead the transgressive group welcomes them, comforts them, gives them that sense of identity through belonging and the meaning of being.
Professor Vittorino Andreoli, a famous Veronese psychiatrist, underlines how “the grandchildren appear confused and disoriented in a society so accelerated that they cannot stop on examples to follow, in the period of growth”. Faced with this, he sees how adults struggle even to define how and what it means to educate.
In my clinical practice I often find elderly people who feel unable to do what they have always done, also due to the lack of physical strength. I recommend reinventing themselves by becoming living witnesses of their time spent with young grandchildren. The reality of Nazi concentration camps is a very different thing in the books and in the memory of an elder I attended in high school.
Andreoli stresses that “wisdom is the strength of old age, a phase of existence that is considered useless, if not a burden, when measured solely with the parameters of the economy”. He then proposes and recommends “uniting the silent time of the old with the pounding need of this generation that sees in experiences and in making a strong motivation”.
I find interesting and important some considerations proposed by Dr. Anna Ferrari, clinical psychologist. The children “feel annoyed by the ever-changing rules and, particularly, by that part of teachers who sometimes impose them first, without however respecting them. And they suffer from a lack of socialization, too many “missed first times” in friendship, in relationships, in love. Those moments that for many of us have marked the fundamental stages of life “. In the face of all this and unlike in the past, young people” are not angry, but are generally resigned, they simply stand still “.
After the analysis and observation of critical issues: Are there any solutions? What prospects? What hopes?
Talking about immediate or magical solutions seems difficult. I believe that for a peaceful evaluation we must learn from historians and review the critical moments of the past and start from there to review our current moment with the necessary detachment. Man has always dreamed of and desired peace, serenity and well-being, but he has rarely lived them fully and for a long time.
If we read the disastrous effects of ancient and more recent pandemics we can realize that the effects and mortality were much more important than the Covid 19 pandemic. We have had a wealth of medical-biological knowledge and a technology that has allowed us to understand the nature of the disease and to build defenses very early and mitigate its effects. In a world where man had believed he was freeing himself from the Creator and replacing himself in the management of life, we discovered our fragility. It turned out to be a fragility that we could call medical in the management of life, but it also revealed a cultural and ideological fragility in the awareness on the part of many of the manifestation of so many imaginative, paranoid, interpretative thoughts that perhaps only psychiatrists knew. Perhaps we had been living for some time in a split world, between two separate worlds at home without seeing it. Doctors, social workers, law enforcement agencies, assistance volunteers and help in general, those who took care of man and his misery, on the one hand; politics, television, newspapers, tour operators, restaurants, entertainment, entertainment, on the other. A bit as if we were all under the same roof of the house, but there were those who saw the beach and the sea and those who saw the scullery, the garbage dumps and the warehouses.
The emergence and verification collectively and individually of this fragility and this hidden world, has led to a greater widespread awareness of these and many other negative aspects of our real world. We think of the impotence in the face of death, the difficulty of health care, the inequalities of medical assistance in different continents, the problems deriving from an economy too tied to unbridled globalization, the insecurity of the world of social media and the danger of the ignorant and know-it-all so-called experts. sanitary ware that fill the various media with fake news and anything else that has been heavily shown to us in these two years.
As said for the children, also for us adults, for the rulers politics and the economy and for everyone it is from the awareness of errors and deficiencies that new ideas arise to solve, change, innovate and give resources to be able to truly put in place. I note the different and more adequate realities that serve the world to improve and avoid new errors. So, today that we are more aware of our reality and our blindness, we can hope that everyone sets out on the path towards a more attentive, alert and less infatuated feeling with respect to those aspects of globalization, computerization, individualism, conflictuality that they dominated and characterized the first years of the third millennium.
Let us therefore seek in this pandemic event and in all the difficulties to see with confidence a future “resurgence” of Man, of Homo sapiens and of a less wise humanity, rich, hasty, superficial and joyful, but more united, attentive to other, educating and respectful of the environment and of herself. Surely as in the past there are and will be wise, attentive and positive men who will be able to guide humanity towards healthier lifestyles on a psychiatric level and more adequate on a social level.
At the end of this story of problems and difficulties of young people and men of today, I want to conclude with a word, from prof. Marco Trabucchi, psycho-geriatrician, capable of reinforcing the will to seek feelings of hope and thrust towards commitment: “It is worth setting sail for the farthest star, without being discouraged by the night that surrounds us.”
Dr. Luigi Trabucchi. Psychiatrist Verona