Luana De Vita tells her family story in ten chapters—just over 120 pages—as the daughter of a man living with severe mental illness. She narrates without strict chronology, but circles around key themes: four decades of life shaped by her father's depression and mania, violence and alcoholism. A man she both loved and hated, fiercely.
From the raw analysis of someone who lived this tragedy on her own skin—through police stations, psychiatric clinics, and emergency rooms—emerges a portrait of society's indifference and ignorance, and the arrogance of Italy's healthcare system, which turns away not only the patient but the family as well.
The family bears the weight. Everything falls to them—handed over without formal recognition, without resources, without anything except blame: "When we're not the cause, we're absent. If we're not absent, we're uncooperative. If we're uncooperative, we're rigid. Either way, we exist only so people can dump their guilt on us".
Then comes the paradox—a psychiatrist summarizing the impact of Law 180: "The families of the mentally ill held firm. They didn't abandon almost anyone. They did what perhaps only the Italian family could do". So it was the families who "held firm," not the institutions that were supposed to replace the closed asylums.
De Vita does not shy away from holding the national health system accountable—a system incapable of organizing itself or providing care as the "sacred principles" of Law 180 demand. Those principles remain words on paper. Their translation into actual services has arrived only in scattered places across Italy. The result is untenable: a patient like her father "cannot live in a family home because he needs people trained to manage his crises, his manias, his relentless demands. Psychological distress inside a house can actually be magnified. One sick person becomes four or five—all the relatives around him, forced by the system's negligence and incompetence to care for monsters that don't exist in the world but that torment our loved ones every day".
De Vita approaches her story from multiple angles, building a precise picture of how a family—especially the women—lived alongside psychiatric illness, containing it as best they could, adapting to shifts in treatment and medication over the years, often facing arrogance from doctors. She speaks not only of her own experience but of others, some of whom became tragic news stories—always seen through the eyes of a family member of someone with mental illness. These are facts about people, real people living perhaps next to us, whom we should not ignore or look past.
Cristina Tersigni, 2004