This article is published in issue 7 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until February 16, 2021
The worst thing there is is unnecessary pain. «Pain that does not teach, does not regenerate, does not renew. Not the pain of growth but of prison ». Psychiatric pain is like this. And “If you’ve never experienced psychiatric pain don’t say it doesn’t exist. Thank the Lord and be silent ».
The quotes come from the book by Paolo Milone The art of connecting people (Einaudi). A book that pierced and kidnapped me for its humanity and authenticity as well as for its wonderful direct, crisp, poetic writing.
Milone is a psychiatrist who worked for forty years in emergency psychiatry in Genoa. A person of disarming intelligence and sensitivity, capable of transforming into a work of art something that has nothing poetic: something unspeakable, and often invincible, like psychiatric illness. Milone who writes «The important thing in this profession is not what you say or what you do but to be there. If you are there, the patient then does everything by himself ».
Milone who recognizes that «Do not seek awareness of existing: everyone lives in more or less thick fog. Choose your place on the slope, and pull up home. ‘ The art of binding people leads into a world, that of psychic illness, of senseless pain, which seems opaque and impermeable: but Milone knows how to tell and therefore make sense even of what a sense does not have, sings Vasco (who has turned sixty-nine in the meantime, and best wishes).
Paolo Milone’s is a book, as I wrote on Instagram, that makes you want to give up everything, change your life, do something useful for others. You ask yourself: «Why does this reading affect me like this? Am I depressed? A euphoric? A neurotic? If I had read it when I was eighteen, would I have been a psychiatrist? ‘
The art of connecting people tells what it means to feel the pain of others and try to do something about it: it is a great book for this too.
And then for Genoa and for the sea, which is breathed around the words: a sea that is there, in front of everything, listens and contains.
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