This article is published in issue 5 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until February 2, 2021
Even if the classification error of Lombardy in the red zone was only one week and not several, as it would seem, it means shops closed during the sales period. Confesercenti has quantified the damage, for traders, at 600 million euros in the whole of Lombardy, 200 million in Milan alone.
Eugenio Borgna is a ninety-year-old Lombard psychiatrist, one of the good ones, who since the 1960s was experimenting with a new way of approaching psychiatric illness: more humane and more respectful of the patient’s pain.
In presenting his new book, which has a vintage title like Great thoughts come from the heart (Raffaello Cortina Editore), told Roberta Scorranese something to write down in a notebook and go and reread every now and then: “One of the many forms of impoverishment born of this pandemic is the feeling of not living these months or of having burnt the year just passed. Nothing more false ». And then: «We must not fear emotions such as sadness and melancholy». What Borgna has always said is that we must go easy on psychiatric drugs and that too many doctors identify every pain of the soul as a psychiatric disease. On the other hand, suffering people who should instead be treated with drugs (I always remember this because I had a mother who was sick with obsessive anxiety who did not care) do not.
Professor Borgna says that today he sees rivers of antidepressants being administered to people who are experiencing only a condition of melancholy.
It is true that sadness and melancholy are too scary, because when you are sad you are convinced that you have always been sad, and that you will be sad forever, while instead, unless you are seriously ill, more or less everything passes, knowing how to wait.
But if I were a beautician or a shopkeeper who could not work for weeks and had to face worries, anxieties, sadness – in some cases up to depression – because in the Lombardy Region someone made a mess with Excel sheets sending it to the red zone even when it wasn’t supposed to, I would be very angry I would demand clarity and justice, or at least the resignation of the governor, this time.
We accept sadness and melancholy without psychiatric drugs when they are existential and fleeting, we gladly keep them, we use them to get to know each other better, as Professor Eugenio Borgna suggests, but we should also be able to recognize their reasons, when they are objective such as injustices, incorrectness, nonsense and toxic relationships – and learning to get angry when needed.
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